A painful place to start: The RCP has not developed, ever, a mass partisan political base for revolutionary communist politics anywhere, among any section of the people.

This political current has won recruits, in ones and twos, from people whose life and study gave them a inclination toward communism. But the language and banners of this movement have never connected. Revolutionary communists have never found the ways to fuse revolutionary politics with the aspirations of the masses. They have not created the thousands of “organized ties” or the “political base areas” that they worked for decades to build. The RCP never succeeded in transforming its racial or class composition — it has not trained or recruited significant numbers of new communists from the proletariat and oppressed nationalities despite all the efforts in that direction.

The RCP tried to take up the responsibilities of a vanguard force. But it has never succeeded in becoming a “party” — in the sense of actually leading a section of people that consciously supports its cause.[16]

Any synthesis that does not solve or even acknowledge these basic problems has a gaping hole at its very core.

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) criticizes a trend within the international communist movement (ICM):

Since we are talking bluntly here about failure, we need to talk about context. Reading an essay by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek recently, I stopped hard on this sentence:

Yes! There is far too much of this “negative pathos” around, as if we communists should chant, “We’re not worthy,” alongside Wayne and Garth. As if a shuffling, round-shouldered self-hatred would be the only possible proof that we communists “get” the lessons of our own past. That would be exactly wrong.

We need to excavate our shortcomings and listen to the criticism of others. But we will do so because the people of the world need a radically re-conceived communist project. They need revolutionary internationalists in the U.S. to do our part well, here and now. We have something worthy to bring to this passage of history. And for that we must emulate Lenin’s hunger to win and his focus on grabbing the chance within the maelstrom.

This is a matter of intention, but not just intention. New truth emerges from the currently inexplicable — after practice reveals fissures in previous conceptions. We are at such a moment, not just around our own specific political practice, but at several levels of the human adventure.

How much of this failure of the RCP comes from the difficult objective conditions in the U.S.? How much is rooted in flaws of the RCP’s line and approach?

Clearly both are involved and intertwined.

These have been “awful decades” for communist work here. The plunder of a whole world has nurtured a corrupt political stability. The people are deeply affected by illusions, pulls of passivity and dreams of advancing within this system.

Here is one sign that these objective difficulties are very real: The RCP is hardly the only organized trend to have had trouble. No radical, left or revolutionary forces have gotten durable traction since the ‘70s — not revolutionary Black nationalists, not anarchists, not soft-socialist trade union organizers, not the Greens. Various left trends have also had their moments of influence, but all failed to develop ongoing support for their larger programs. Most have fared far worse than the RCP. Oppositional politics has flowed into loose social and cultural movements that are often organized around pressuring for reforms.

The objective conditions are the main reason why there has not been either a mass revolutionary movement or the basis for any actual revolutionary attempts. And these conditions have acted back on the subjective factor (the lines within the party itself) exacerbating now one or another “pull” — sometimes toward non-revolutionary tailing of the mass movements, sometimes toward a sectified acceptance of “puny thinking,” and now increasingly toward rampant wishful thinking.

These are errors made by sincere and dedicated revolutionaries operating under frustrating political conditions — but they are errors nonetheless. While the RCP tried to “wrench” all it could out of each moment — practice has fallen very far short of their hopes, and also — I believe — short of what could have been done with different methods and plans.

There have been long-standing problems of method and approach in the RCP’s work — how it viewed itself, the masses and the revolutionary process — that have all contributed to the overall failure.

Communists have not successfully “charted the uncharted course” or mastered how to “do revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation.”[19]

The RCP’s failures in practice were not for lack of trying: This party fought from many sides to create a revolutionary movement around its politics. At one time or another over 35 years, the RCP tried to dig in among industrial workers, farm workers, Black proletarian youth, various immigrant communities, the homeless in major cities, the social movements of radical activists, punk street youth, progressive artists, outraged scientists and more. The party launched itself into militant trade unionism, then later into building proletarian bases around “mass combativity,” and then building broad mass movements around police brutality, imperialist war and the rise of the Christian fascists.

This work was carried out under an evolving strategic plan: In the 1970s, we told ourselves that “taking Marxism-Leninism to the workers is taking it home.” But we discovered that this “home” (among the unionized workers of basic industry) was already well stocked with other ideologies. The workers were apparently quite attached to them. The RCP then concluded that the real home for Marxism was “lower and deeper” in the ranks of the “real proletariat” — who are less privileged and conservatized.[20]

By 1980, the RCP rejected a previous emphasis on trade union struggles and the workers in heavy industry. It adopted a new central task called “Create Public Opinion, Seize Power” (CPOSP). This was intended to pursue doing “revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation” — in preparation for “the Time.”

From the beginning there was tension (and real line struggle) within the framework CPOSP. How much was communist work rooted in agitation and propaganda (centered around the newspaper)? How much was it focused on leading the masses in struggle (along key social fault lines)? How much do we focus on exposing the outrages of this system, and how much on the need for a new system? How does a communist movement accumulate forces, train revolutionary organizers, develop mass organization under communist leadership, and raise consciousness of the need for a new society and change-through-revolution?

There were real controversies over how, and even whether, to use the party’s press among the people. Formally the communist press was seen as the key way of connecting the people to an explicitly communist movement, and “diverting” their understandings. But at various times and places over the decades of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the What-Is-To-Be-Done-ist work around the newspaper took a distant second place behind efforts to lead people in political struggles.

After the late 1980s, and then especially after the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, the party made a series of shifts toward developing base areas among the most oppressed sections of the population — focused on selected housing projects and sweatshop districts. Two things were asserted as part of those shifts: First, that it was important to “come from within.” There had not been much success in acting as “revolutionary ambulance chasers” — showing up as unknowns, with leaflets and newspapers, whenever some atrocity or struggle went down.

And second there was an emphasis on building the organized “mass combativity” of people — taking the 1917 Viborg district or the Peruvian experiences of Raucana as rough models of how a mass radical oppositional movement could be built[21] — especially among oppressed youth. This took distance from an early trend toward “advanced actions” where the party and a few individuals combatively stepped out — to burn flags or obstruct the destruction of housing projects — in hopes of inspiring others to follow.

This was a plan to create partisan political base areas — where the party would lead combative mass political struggle, build wisely-constructed party organization around the communist press, and publicly set radical new terms for how people related to each other. And there remained a view of building a broader revolutionary united front — in many ways that would be energized and radicalized around an emerging proletarian core.[22]

There was much value to this orientation toward the youth, toward the oppressed, toward the protracted work of “coming from within” and toward polarizing society around an emerging revolutionary core.

These changes were an assertion of the importance in accumulating forces, leading struggle and “developing the muscles” of a real social force. And the importance of actually organizing people was incorporated in a new formulation of the central task (in the 2001 draft program): “Create Public Opinion, Seize Power — prepare minds and organize forces for revolution.”

The organizing projects associated with these “shifts” played an important role in training the next generation of communists. But the RCP never succeeded in creating the much-desired base areas for the party’s politics. The U.S. has no Red Wedding District, Raucana, Kreuzberg or Putilov Works.[23] There were never multiplying circles of newspaper readers creating an ongoing basis for the party’s influence and leadership.[24]

At the same time, this practical work was never characterized by simple isolation. At times, the RCP has been able to unite with significant numbers of people to wage struggle — from the 1970s coalfields, to antiwar resistance, to the 1990s marches in LA against police brutality. Those have been moments when the “crown lay in the gutter” and a bold political force could give shape to grievances. Still, the influence built around important short-term demands and the “felt needs of the masses” did not develop into a partisan base of support for the party itself or its program of proletarian revolution.

Like it or not, the RCP’s experience reveals a real and continuing gap between communist politics and even the advanced among the masses.

There are significant numbers of people curious about revolutionary politics. We meet them whenever we walk out the door. But even the most advanced, discontented, restless, conscious sections of the people, even those who CRAVE a revolutionary change, are often not particularly inclined toward a revolutionary communist pole. It is a gap that is objective to us. It has deep roots — in how politics in the U.S. developed, in the international position of U.S. imperialism, in social mobility, in the privatization of American life, in the dynamics of racist oppression — and in the general verdict that alternative societies have sadly “failed.”

This is a gap that a communist movement either learns how to bridge or doesn’t. This needs to be much more deeply summed up in order to be transformed — in a process that the RCP has shied away from in regard to its own practice.

Real disappointment within the RCP over the protracted failures of base-building encouraged currents of orthodox dogmatism that seemed resigned to puny marginalization — content with political work in tired familiar circles, in ways that never lit the sky or dared to actually lead. It also fanned a tendency to tail whatever promised traction — content to become administrators of mass movements and willing to lower sights in a reformist way. “Build the sea to swim in, bring in an independent role.” Or so it was said in the 1990s — but far too often the second half of that slogan evaporated. An unspoken verdict gained influence: “We have seen all the revolution we are going to see.”

The wind of life gusting around the Mumia campaign, the national movement against police brutality, and the post-911 antiwar activities actually caused intensified stresses. These problems demanded line struggle and new theoretical work — grounded in a materialist accounting of all that previous work. That did not happen. In particular: There has been no summation of the last twenty years of work in building base areas in the “real proletariat” — at least no serious summation known to the membership, or those involved in this work, or that emerged to be discussed as part of the larger Draft Programme process. And silence still surrounds those important experiences. The spiral from theory to practice back to theory has been broken.

In the last few years, a new leading line in the RCP argues that the problem over decades has been that the party (as a whole) was gripped by a “revisionist package,” in opposition to Avakian. The party itself “got in the way” of its own chairman’s ability to reach and transform the masses. Such a simple-but-unlikely explanation makes summation of real work and real shortcomings less necessary.

In theory and practice, this new line has pointed in a very different direction. The old tension between newspaper agitation and leading mass political struggle has been superseded: Both are now overshadowed (and redefined by) the work of promoting Avakian as the central leader of the revolution. Communist work must now be centered around the task of “appreciating, promoting and popularizing this rare, unique and special leader, his body of work, method and approach.”

In the absence of materialist summation, a project of multiple fantasies can take hold. There is the fantasy of “re-polarizing” the society around one leader, linked to other fantasies of “vaulting” to mass influence in a crudely voluntarist way.[25]

Summing up decades of precious experience is crucial for the forging of new practice and a new communist synthesis. Whoever among us is willing, let’s dig in.

Opposing the IraqWar.

Photo: J.B. Connors

Opposing police brutality, Chicago.

Photo: J.B. Connors

In 2000, on the 25th anniversary of the RCP, the Revolutionary Worker wrote:

There was some truth to that, then. Can any one look at the party today and still say that?

Problems of dogmatism, self-isolation and political fantasy — that have always plagued the RCP and contended within its politics — are now in command to a new degree. The heart of this — both its theoretical core and most visible manifestation — is how the RCP’s central leader, Bob Avakian, is seen and promoted.

The RCP now holds that “once a unique leader of this caliber emerges” the tasks and responsibilities of the party and its members change — in ways that directly impact revolutionary strategy. “If we don’t do anything else,” it is said, “we must do the promotion of this leader well.” This concentrates a major change in line. While the RCP still seeks to lead struggle around major fault lines in society, such crucial work clearly takes a back seat to the promotion of this cult of personality.

One graphic comparison reveals a great deal about the change:

On the left is the RCP’s poster from May Day 1980. On the right is the cover on Revolution newspaper’s 2007 “Special Issue on Bob Avakian.” The cover on the right is clearly a retread of the poster on the left. That similarity creates a chance to “compare and contrast the lines”:

In 1980, the RCP was putting out a challenge to advanced workers, who are portrayed in a doorway, possibly on the verge of stepping out, alone if necessary, with their eyes set on dreams of red flags and revolution. It is a poster that is marked in some ways by a lingering workerism — complete with hard hat, factory setting and a presumably male figure. However (setting all that aside) the political essence of the poster was posing a choice to the workers themselves about daring to act and transform the political stage in a revolutionary direction.

By contrast, the 2007 cover shows the uplifted profile of a party supporter with eyes fixed intently on the word “leadership.” It is an act of adoration. The challenge now is not “Take history into our hands!” It is now “Engage with Bob Avakian,” to become a “follower.”

Previously the party’s work was seen as rooted in “What-Is-To-Be-Done-ism.” It involved being a “tribune of the people” using lively and compelling communist exposure, agitation and propaganda that “put before all our communist convictions.” It envisioned a paper as an organizational “scaffolding” and “collective organizer” for a diverse and growing revolutionary movement. It aspired to being a newspaper that could “cast a line” far beyond the organized ranks of communists.

The RCP now holds that there are “two mainstays” of communist work — one “mainstay” is the work of “AP&P” (developing the appreciation, promotion and popularization of Avakian). The other “mainstay” is the work of the newspaper. And the newspaper has also been reconceived to give greater weight to Avakian’s theoretical articles and to promoting his “re-envisioning of communism,” while the concepts of agitation and exposure have undergone a related transformation. This new conceptual package is called “Enriched What-Is-To-Be-Done-ism.” That enrichment is a negation of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. It represents a different (and idealist) view of how the activity and consciousness of people can be diverted in a communist direction.

The “two mainstays” formulation marks a major departure from the Party’s previous strategic views. One way or another, the Party’s 2001 New Draft Programme[27] has been superseded — though replacement formulations are not public yet.

The net effect is that the promotion of Avakian — as a person, leader and theorist — is much more fully at the center of the Party’s work, including its new conception of the communist press.

In this synthesis, the organized collectivity of the party has been demoted to an “instrumentality” of the great leader. Several promising projects of mass struggle have been allowed to wither, or been transformed into “vehicles” for get-rich-quick fantasies.

For example, on October 5, 2006, the RCP had plans to conjure a government-shaking movement into being. They were spectacularly unsuccessful. Avakian later said:

Let’s unpack this: The “vehicle” has been built and the masses have (yet again!) not responded according to plan. And who gets the blame?

Not the current party leadership. Not the plan. Who is left (logically) to blame but the masses (and the lower level of cadre)?

It is as if the RCP’s leadership feels their pearls have been cast before swine.[29] Is every utterance of leadership a gem? Does skeptical withholding of “appreciation” by comrades and the masses mean they are part of the problem? Impending failure of many kinds drives forward a farrago of scapegoating.

There is complicity and corruption within an imperialist superpower. But blaming, shaming and literally cursing the masses is wrong — both in principle and in this particular case. (And it is wrong with or without a caveat like “Ultimately it is our responsibility.”)

Here leaders dream up grand schemes out of whole cloth — without forming alliances, constituencies or trained networks over time. They don’t have their own base to bring to the process. They “plan” to reach millions without actually organizing thousands — as if the masses will be jolted by public appeals in newspaper ads and made to flow, like water, through a quickly engineered canal.

We should be suspicious of such contrivances and “get rich quick” schemes. They flow from a sectarian view of what “proletarian leadership of the united front” means, of how a revolutionary movement is built and led.

A party without a correct mass line — without a correct approach toward leading and learning from the people — cannot hope to lead a great revolution or a new society. This is a problem that urgently needs theory, struggle and solution.

The RCP has understood that communists can’t merely hold a mirror up to the masses to reflect (and politically tail) whatever people already know and think. This party has understood that communist work needs to bring revolutionary, scientific understandings from without — from outside the experiences, struggles and understandings that the people themselves spontaneously generate.

However these crucial insights have been applied in a sterile and sectarian way. The RCP has not correctly appreciated the importance of actually organizing the advanced to win over the intermediate in their masses. There is little practical sense of alliance, coalition or protracted engagement with other political forces or with important sections of the people. There is little sense of how people, in their masses, learn through struggle (even as communist political work and leadership “diverts” that process to influence how radical it gets.).

Summation will have to be made of how much specific “mass initiatives” gave rise to real organization, breadth, ferment and struggle — certainly efforts around Mumia Abu-Jamal, police brutality, and early antiwar work had a real breath of life. These efforts often represented a desire to take initiative and respond to burning issues in society. However overall, and especially more recently, the RCP’s “mass initiatives” have taken on a more and more skeletal and self-isolating nature.

The belief that huge movements will congeal around prefabricated vehicles is no minor or recent problem: The RCP itself has been conceived as such a “vehicle.”

The RCP originally emerged from a political upsurge where revolutionary forces had real, if primitive roots among the people. But those roots shriveled as that upsurge died. In the 1980s, the party correctly stressed its need to have tens of thousands of “organized ties” in each city and established political base areas in order to be able to make an approach to power.

However as those goals were not accomplished, the party seems to have fallen back, more and more, on a mythology— where at some future point the masses of people will come to “the rescue of a few scores” of revolutionaries. Lenin’s poetic phrase is often taken too literally, as if a small stubborn agitation-based organization can have its correctness and leadership suddenly discovered by awakening millions and can then catapult to power “in a telescoped way.”

As if zero-to-60 is possible — if all the gears are clicking, if the moment’s right, and if full appreciation of the “Main Man” is in command.

This is an illusion.

This conception of forging a vanguard has never produced either a revolution or a real vanguard party with deep living roots among the people. It rests on an instrumentalist distortion of the Bolshevik history.[30]

No substantive revolutionary party ever came to have social weight through some magical “telescoping” from a few “scores” of rootless communists — not Mao’s Communist party and Red Army (who emerged from the earlier Nationalist upsurge), or the German KPD (who emerged with major forces out of the previous Social Democratic movement), not the Naxalites of India nor the Maoists of Nepal.

And it was never true of the Bolsheviks either. Early in Lenin’s work he put it this way:

The Bolsheviks were occasionally decimated by repression. The links were often broken between their leaders in exile and their activists on the ground. But this was nonetheless a party that emerged with deep connections to social movements against the maddening backwardness of Tsarist Russia and the brutal oppression of working people.[32]

The Bolshevik Party was not just a few circles of Lenin’s followers who suddenly sprouted political wings “in a telescoped way.” They were a real party carved into the political life of that empire, with lively internal political life and raucous differences, real roots within a real social base (especially from 1905 onward), and an organizational capacity to influence and lead. They grew in both size and influence under that “awful” decade before 1917.[33]

All communist parties that have been able to seriously contend emerged organically, pulling their forces out of larger radical movements and broad anti-system intellectual currents by a living process of fusion and differentiation. To take power, especially if you intend to dismantle the old state — you need more than a line, or a “special” leader, or even a shadow cabinet — you need the organizational wellsprings of a shadow state emerging within the framework of the old order. You need to win over and train thousands of creative and hardened cadre capable of becoming the framework for the new state — a force capable of seizing power, directing the economy and its transformation, creating a new media, and so on.

And imagine how much more true this is now — given the mind-boggling complexity of modern society — than it was in agrarian China or semi-agrarian Russia.

Yes, in periods of intense crisis, many new forces can be attracted to existing revolutionary movements. Some things will have to be “telescoped,” but they can’t all be. As Avakian once knew, a political movement can “come from behind” but it can’t “come from nowhere.” To actually seize and hold power in a major social crisis, a revolutionary party needs to arrive at that crisis with flesh and bone.

So, how is a revolutionary vanguard forged under our conditions?

Seriously attempting this will require something quite different from what we now have. We need a revolutionary current that grows and emerges within the living tissue of today’s wrenching contradictions – as thousands of radical people go through a series of political processes together, under conditions where creative communist politics can seriously contend and transform. There is a necessary process with stages and leaps that you learn more about as they ripen – all as the revolutionary pole works to accumulate and transform organized forces. There are turning points where you either have critical mass and correct methods, or you are not in the game.

For all this, communists need a culture of organizing people to wage sharp struggle over the major questions of society. And we need a deeply creative new sense of how to bring revolutionary understandings to those who want to change the world.

To launch this process we need to criticize incorrect understandings entrenched in Avakian’s new synthesis. But that is only the start. This is a process that will deepen only as we will learn more by doing more.

In sum: The RCP’s current path and methods have not worked and will not work.

Its recent strategic turn is indifferent to the lessons of its own practice. It is a voluntarist attempt to magically leap over real obstacles and necessary stages in communist work. The assumption that things can come together, suddenly and massively, under communist leadership makes an idealist overestimation of spontaneity. If unchallenged, it will squander the remaining revolutionary communist forces within the U.S.

Looking back, I have been struck by the damage done by the constant suggestion that a revolutionary crisis might be just over the horizon. It is as if the RCP has been operating through a series of two-year, or three-year plans — hurling itself into this, then pulling out to hurl itself into that. In fact, developing deep ties among the people requires perseverance, maturity, careful choices and real commitment to those choices — nota rootlessness that constantly shifts plans based on short-term speculations and expectations of quick growth.

It was a promising thing in the late 1980s, when the RCP raised to itself the importance of “coming from within.” And yet the party’s overall method repeatedly thwarted that process. The party’s work has remained a series of “forays” — constantly reapproaching people “from without,” as if they are some unexplored territory. Over and over, the party would pull back without real roots or networks, only to sally out again in some new direction with new hopes and schemes.

In a very typical statement, the party said (summing up disappointments in 2005):

In some important ways, the masses of people have always remained “out there” for this party — as something separate, distant, unresponsive, and very disappointing. Objective conditions played their role in this — but a bitter view of the people has taken root subjectively.

A revolutionary organization has to be integrated into struggles of the people — directly in its own name while connecting with (or initiating) a variety of other organizations. And it has to draw the thinking and activity of people toward creatively-conceived communist solutions to this awful capitalist present – a task which can only be accomplished with methods that are bold yet sophisticated (not hackneyed or infantile).

The issue here is, again, the mass line — which rests on an understanding that people need to emancipate themselves, and that it can’t be done “for” them. In a fundamental way, people (in their masses) are the makers of human progress and emancipation. This materialist insight has a series of necessary consequences for communist work and socialist society.

In words, the RCP affirms that revolution is an act of “the masses in their millions.” However, its methods of “mass work” have moved farther and farther away from organizing or learning from (or even appreciating) those people who are not interested in becoming “followers of Bob Avakian.” There is an overestimation of how much the communists already know, and an underestimation of the importance of knowing the people well, so that revolutionary communications can truly connect with our key audiences.

In place of the mass line, there is a one-sided stress on telling — in patronizing ways reminiscent of Christian evangelizing. As if communist analysis in convoluted detail will sprout a revolutionary movement with real social weight. Here the fetish of the word morphs into the fetish of the leader. It tries to “vault over” the complicated processes by which people really decide what to think and how to act.

Re-reading documents from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I noticed again how Mao believes people develop consciousness and sophistication in the course of political struggle. One key document announces: “Let the masses educate themselves in the movement.”[35] People learn to appreciate and apply the ideology of revolution and communism in the course of political struggle.

This is in contrast to Avakian’s linear view of first theory and ideology, and then mass organization:

This linear view is embodied in the RCP’s current linear tactics: First study Avakian, then go tell people about it, then expect them to congeal as organization on that basis.

However, the ripening of a revolutionary people is in many ways an objective process. For example: The civil rights generation of African American activists were quite organized, while deeply wedded to bourgeois-democratic illusions about integration and voting. They became revolutionized by their practical experiences and by events that formed the larger context for that work.

Such moments of mass political experience cry out for revolutionary communist activity, so that strands of oppositional and revolutionary sentiments actually go over to communist consciousness and serious preparation.

I believe we may be entering such a radicalization period among immigrant workers in the U.S. — who come here as refugees of the larger “planet of slums.”[37] I hope we see such a period emerge among Black youth in the wake of Katrina and the Jena events.

We need to be very sensitive to such potential radicalization, and poised to respond with energy and strategic appreciation. We need to reclaim the understanding that we are responsible for organizing a specific political revolution for socialism in a specific country (as part of a world process). We need to build a base deep among the oppressed and proletarian. We need to persevere in bringing forward young advanced proletarians as communist political cadre and leaders of society generally. We need an inspiringly multinational movement that has a deep thinking on the current conditions facing oppressed nationality communities and lives-and-breathes the struggle against racism and white supremacy. We need to create a visible, attractive, accessible revolutionary communist pole at every step of this process — whose solution of socialist revolution makes sense in a living way to growing numbers of people. We need a militant movement that dares light the sky in combative ways that stir the heart — not a risk-adverse trend that nervously jumps at shadows. And we have to do our work, wisely and well, in ways that protect the party’s links to the masses of people, not merely its crucial inner core.

And each part of that last paragraph stands in sharp contrast to the road the RCP has now taken.

Let’s grapple together again over how to actually build a base for revolutionary politics deep among the oppressed, learning from the positive and negative experiences of the past.

May First.

Photo: J.B. Connors

There are major philosophical questions of truth and reality that communists urgently need to take up. Avakian sniffs at some of them and papers over others.

This is not the place to give these larger questions the depth and freshness they deserve. And I am not the writer to draw those threads together. That must be one of our collective projects-to-come. The best I can offer are the following tentative thoughts on Avakian’s philosophical claims.

Step into a room full of geologists or working philosophers, and announce “Our leader Bob Avakian has made a major epistemological break. He says we have to go for the truth, rather than hiding things.”

Would anyone be impressed?

The need for an honest pursuit of truth is pretty old news to most thinking people. So is Avakian’s other argument that we should engage the arguments of opponents and independent thinkers in depth — with an intention of learning from them in the course of our own work.[41]

When Louis Althusser first analyzed Marx’s epistemological break, he compared this leap in historical understanding to the breaks made by Galileo in physics, Lavoisier in chemistry, Darwin and Mendel in biology and so on.[42] Each of these breaks with medieval idealism split society’s thinking into before-and-after — and that philosophical and scientific process, of pioneering a materialist struggle for truth, is now hundreds of years old.

Avakian’s epistemological rupture is far more limited. It is conceived only as a “rupture with a lot of the history of the whole ICM.” And in that narrow framework, it has value. We should be fans of Conquer the World. It opened doors toward a materialist examination of the history of communism by communists.

But this attempted rupture within MLM is hardly a breath-taking innovation for how larger society thinks. It is really a very late plea for Maoism to race to catch up with a basic scientific approach to truth that is casually assumed in many spheres of investigation.

Avakian’s break is actually banal wherever serious research and debate goes on — i.e., wherever thinking is not dominated by religious dogma, the lying of politicians, or the bully habits of paid hacks. The fact that his defense of truth may be shocking and disquieting among Maoists is not proof of its profundity. It is (unfortunately) a confession of the poverty within that Maoist movement.

There is real glory and continuing value to Maoism, as a body of thought and as a movement for liberation. As a distinct international trend, it was born during the 1960s in raging opposition to both the global rampages of the U.S. and the suffocating gray norms of the Soviet Union. Maoism proclaimed “It is right to rebel against reactionaries,” and gave new life to the revolutionary dream. It said “Serve the People,” and promised that no one (not even the communist vanguard) would be above the interrogations of the people. A loose global current congealed from many eclectic streams, and it included many of the world’s most serious revolutionaries. There have been important and heroic attempts at power — in Turkey, Iran, India, the Philippines, Peru, Nepal and more. There were important revolutionary movements of 1968 that included Maoists in France, Germany, Italy and more. There was real ferment around the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and then at times around the RCP in the U.S.

But since Mao died in 1976, this Maoist movement has not been a fertile nursery of daring analyses and concepts. A mud streak has run through it. Even its best forces often cling to legitimizing orthodoxies, icons, and formulations. The popularization of largely-correct verdicts often replaces the high road of scientific theory — allowing Marxism itself to appear pat, simple and complete. Dogmatic thinking nurtures both self-delusion and triumphalism. In the name of taking established truths to the people, revolutionary communists have often cut themselves off from the new facts and creative thinking of our times.

We need to break with that fiercely, and seek out the others who agree.

In a cloistered universe, Avakian’s ruptures in inherited ideologies can appear as a radical break. But measured by our tasks, it hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

The issue facing our movement is not so much “are we for truth?” The issue is much more “what is true and what isn’t?” It involves the problem of bridging the limited and prejudiced vantage point of each observer, and collectively getting into what is real. It is the measure of theories, established verdicts and relative truths against objective truth.

In Avakian’s hands, theory is teased far away from practice.[43] And the result of this methodological denigration of practice is (ultimately) new strains of subjective idealism.[44]

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach starts by making exactly this point:

A persistent example of this denigration of practice is the marked dilettantism of Avakian’s analysis. Avakian is an innovative and provocative thinker, but his expositions are often brainstorms masquerading as science. They often involve his commentary on a bookshelf of popular commentators and typically use a revealing quote or sometimes a close textual read of those commentators as a substitute for real research. This is fine for agitation and public argumentation. It is fine for running out preliminary ideas and tentative hypotheses. However it is not sufficient for creation and confirmation of the underlying analysis itself. The necessary research (and general summation of practice) does not need to be visible. It can be done by others testing preliminary theses. But it does need to exist and it does need to be done in a critical (and even skeptical) spirit.[45]

Avakian argues for “doing the work” of serious research and engagement with others. He denounces complacency and “the moronization” of his own followers. Here, as in so many places, his own break is incomplete. The model he demonstrates continues the old problems in new idiosyncratic forms.

Take, for example, the RCP’s conclusion that there is a concerted rush toward fascist theocracy that is threatening a deep social schism (even perhaps literally “civil war”) between thinking people and theocrats within the U.S. Go look at the limited and fragmentary work which underlies that claim — not just underlying the public argumentation, but the analysis itself.

Another example: Everyone knows that understanding capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union is important. But how can a movement claim to have a real analysis of those events without working up a credible materialist history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s? How is it possible to assess the Stalin years (with all their complexity, heroism and horror) without having any real analysis of the struggles of the 1930s, including the events called “the purges”[46] in the late thirties? And how can a party claim to “Set the Record Straight” if it makes no effort to learn from the new scholarship and argumentation based on the mountains of information contained in the now-opened Soviet archives? How can we more deeply sum up either the revolution or the counter-revolution in China without a credible materialist history of major events like the Great Leap Forward or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?

When Avakian suggests taking a new look at the GPCR, he means retooling past summations in light of his new theoretical conclusions. There has been very little serious revisiting the actual events and problems in light of new debates and new information.[47]

Avakian exhibits a great precision of formulation but a real lack of rigor in research compared to most serious intellectual work conducted outside his movement.[48]

Dogmatism among communists willfully ignores objective reality and its complexity. That is a problem Avakian calls out. Dogmatism among communists also exaggerates the objective nature of relative truth. That is a problem Avakian aggressively perpetuates (in the name of fighting relativism[49]).

There is objective truth meaning truth that objectively exists — i.e., that corresponds to reality independent of the thoughts of humans. For example it is objectively true that the earth revolves around the sun, and this was objectively true for billions of years before any humans subjectively realized it was true. It was even objectively true before there were humans.

But our ideas emerge from “individual human beings with their extremely limited thought.”[50] The truth is not just “out there” like a ripened fruit waiting to be plucked and delivered whole. What we have available to us are relative truths, which only approximate absolute truth through protracted collective work, where humans develop theories, test and refine them.

In a recent piece, Avakian quotes Mao’s On Practice:

Right after quoting this, Avakian adds: “It is relative truth, but it is truth.”[51]

Avakian acknowledges the existence of relative truth, but his addition here pooh-poohs Mao’s point. And it deliberately downplays all the ways relative truth divides into two — into both truth and falsehood. The relationships between our relative truths and reality are dynamic, contradictory and often painfully tenuous.

Relativism incorrectly asserts that humans are unable to distinguish between true and false, progressive and reactionary. Materialist dialectics, however, insists that we can, through work and struggle, determine true things about reality; but that the truths we uncover remain inherently partial and relative compared to the full and absolute truth about objective reality. If we really grasp that, we see the importance of constantly identifying errors and contradictions in our current thinking.

The inherent contradictions of relative truth are the reason communists need to place great importance on critical thinking, collective vetting, public self-interrogation and the application of the mass line. It takes a great deal of collective struggle and practice to advance human knowledge through the necessary spirals from lower to higher, from somewhat correct to more correct.

The RCP advocates returning complexity to communist analysis, but then, all too often leaches complexity from its own discussion. Here, the real, nagging, structural problems and controversies surrounding the development of correct understandings are minimized. With Avakian’s method and approach, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth are pancaked flat, producing a simplified set of ideological assertions.

Put another way: The actual thing, the perception of that thing, the latest conception arising from perceptions, and the latest presentation of that concept are effectively muddled.[52]

It creates a situation where the RCP can give lip service to critical thinking and yet promote a logic of close-minded zealotry.

At the end, a passionate-sounding defense of objective truth becomes the front-end for overstating the correctness of Avakian’s own current, partial and often flawed set of working assumptions. Supporters of the RCP typically end up promoting a reductionist package: (1) There is the truth, (2) it corresponds to objective reality and (3) “Avakian knows the way out.”

Avakian describes how he views truth entering the class struggle:

Let’s deal with how this describes the way truths “enter into the class struggle.”

This view underestimates the ways class struggle is involved in how relative truth is learned. Truth doesn’t suddenly “enter” the class struggle — because we discover truth through a social process, our knowledge of truth never exists in a realm unmarked by class struggle. Avakian’s comments display a lack of appreciation (actually a denial) of the problem of observer (and of human observers’ inherent limitations and subjectivities).

The real existing social process of uncovering and refining relative truths does not start with a classless inventory of data or a classless connecting of dots to make concepts. There is not a moment when we all watch those new truths cruise into the choppy waters of social controversy.

Complex truths (and in particular complex social truths) are marked by struggle at each point in their existence: including in their whole process of conception and elaboration, in their struggle for acceptance, in the ways they are popularized, in the way their social implications are portrayed, and in the struggle over their eventual replacement by newer and more correct concepts. And such struggle — which takes philosophical, ideological and political forms — is inherently entwined with the larger class struggle raging over the direction and nature of society itself.

I can think of three ways Avakian’s error manifests itself:

First, there is the marked lack of appreciation by Avakian of his own subjective limitations and of the relative nature of his attempts at truth.

Second, there is a one-sided overestimation by the RCP of the degree to which scientific work in bourgeois society spontaneously approximates materialist dialectics.[54] The RCP has downplayed the differences that separate materialist dialectics from the many shades of positivism and empiricism in modern science. This overestimation of spontaneous materialist dialectics has both political and philosophical implications for the RCP — especially given the new strategic prominence the RCP now gives those strata who “work with ideas.”[55]

A third manifestation is Avakian’s rejection of “class truth.” Some of this is hard to unravel since Avakian’s sketchy polemics treat the concepts of “class truth,” “political truth” and “truth as an organizing principle”— as virtually equivalent, and implies that they all imply a denial (or deceitful ignoring) of objective reality. Avakian makes no critical references to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiro-Criticism or Mao’s On Practice or Engels’ Anti-Duhring — so we are left without any clear sense of what, precisely, his break is.

However, in fact, the communist notion of class truth is not “whatever we believe is true, whatever the bourgeoisie believes is not.” Nor is it “we create our reality by declaring our truths, while the bourgeoisie creates its reality through its truths.” Nor is it “whatever serves our cause is true, whatever doesn’t serve our cause should be treated as untrue.”

Avakian criticizes the May 16^th circular, which was an opening shot of the GPCR. It says:

An article from Peking Review’s revolutionary days writes,

Why is that wrong?

Is Lenin so wrong when he writes,

Or Alain Badiou, when he writes,

All of these philosophical problems bubble up in Avakian’s re-envisioning of socialism and communism — the underestimation of practice, the overestimation of the objective character of tentative theories, a dilettantism of historical summation, and the underestimation of class struggle in the fight for truth. There is a lot of assertion about the future with little appreciation of the ways that unanticipated particularities in the future will necessarily shape possibilities and policy. And again, much of this is hard to pin down because of the sketchiness of Avakian’s presentation and the incomplete articulation of his break with Mao. All this will need a more extensive exploration in its own right.

However, for now: the struggle to advance to communism is presented (by Avakian) as a highly ideological process, where intellectual contestations over truth and the allowing of debate (important though those two things are) one-sidedly overshadow the need for waves of mass struggle against old ways, old ideas and capitalist roaders in high places. And once again, Avakian does not correctly understand how the needed transformations of world outlook (among the masses generally) are connected to that class struggle.

Avakian raises the importance of holding onto revolutionary power firmly, while risking a lotto allow space for ferment, criticism and debate.[60] His is a model of a state with key power levers (army, top courts, foreign policy) firmly in the hands of a single vanguard party that simultaneously encourages “vibrant debate and dissent.” Avakian raises a whole subsidiary set of issues regarding the rule of law under socialism, contested elections and the ruling party’s approach to criticisms. He starts a needed polemic against the way that the communist movement has often viewed intellectuals (and really anyone who thinks) as “problem people.” He questions the naive notion that the problems of previous socialism can be solved by institutionalizing more democracy of various kinds.[61] And Avakian explores the historic problem of enabling the masses of people to become (more and more) a decisive part of the “we” that rules during the socialist transition period.

To all of this one can say: So far so good. Virtually everyone recognizes that a major dilemma of earlier socialism was that there was a waning of political liveliness and popular support, and a difficulty rallying mass revolutionary activity for new advances toward communism.

But if we are going to deal with all this, let’s get real as well as “visionary.”

Once again, important questions are raised, and interesting tentative conclusions are put forward — that deserve more critical examination than are allowed around his party.

Avakian’s denigration of practice appears here in at least three ways:

First, there is an overestimation of how fully the theoretical problems of transition can be solved isolated from new practice in seizing, holding and wielding state power. It defies the insights of materialist dialectics (and of communist epistemology) to think anyone can make an overarching new “re-envisioning” solely by mulling over the bones of past revolutions, or that the nagging world historic problems of socialist transition can be pre-solved in some definitive and decisive way.

Mao started developing a critique of Stalin’s socialism quite early in his revolution. He fought to forge a new path (starting with the “Yenan Way” before victory, and then increasingly after coming to power in 1949). But his transition from critique to a new developed-and-developing synthesis required the practical experiences of actually building socialism (including both victories and failures): land reform, implementation of the Soviet industrialization model, the Great Leap Forward, Socialist Education campaigns, and then the GPCR.

Think of the living process, methodology and epistemology concentrated in Mao’s famous remark:

Mao’s theoretical understanding of socialism and his alternative road developed in the course of those storms of class struggle — in the practice of China taking the socialist road and the Soviet Union taking the capitalist road. Mao’s breakthroughs could only have been developed that way. History has given us many critiques of Stalin’s socialism — but Mao’s is unique in its profundity and materialism in part because it is rooted in (and extracted from) the vast practice of our second great revolution.

New theoretical solutions require a deep summation of the past — but also the living practice of actually going through the transition anew (with all the real testing, new errors, and new innovations that this makes possible).

The RCP has always leaned too far in its assumptions of what can be known apart from practice. Two cautionary examples are its past declarations that homosexuality would be “eliminated” under socialism, and its current declarations that it can know (from afar) which transitions to power are possible in Nepal and which are not. The whole elaborate structure of future society that Avakian has constructed in his mind is a creation and culmination of that mistaken methodology.

Second, there is an overestimation of how much the nagging practical problems of socialist transition can be solved now, ahead of time. It is as if adopting Avakian’s approaches like “solid core with a lot of elasticity” now is crucial (for all communists worldwide) to avoid the previous dynamics that plagued socialism in China and the USSR. In fact many stubborn problems of the actual transition to communism and the material basis for solving them emerge from the actual class struggle (from the practice!) of the particular socialist transition, and can’t simply be solved ahead of time.

Certainly the future revolutionary movement must adopt far better methods of learning from and working with people than communists (including the RCP) have historically employed. And yes, improvements now in the grasp of mass line can greatly improve the capacity and nature of that movement which ultimately seizes power.

But revolutions are always (by their nature) on the brink of being “drawn and quartered.” This is not (as Avakian suggests) something brought on by the decisions and choices of revolutionaries. It is not the opening of doors that brings the revolution to an abyss, but the abyss that has historically made it so hard to open the doors.[63] And those problems can be anticipated but not solved apart from the concrete dilemmas of the actual process.

Third, Avakian injects an idealist element into the RCP’s politics when he claims that his “re-envisioning” is at the center of his synthesis. This “enriched What is to be Done-ism” funnels massive energy into questions of the future ultimate transition to communism (like the controversies over “crossing the narrow horizon of bourgeois right”[64]). This method denies the specificity of politics at each necessary stage of revolutionary practice.

It is extremely important to grapple, theoretically and practically, with the problems of socialism and capitalist restoration. It is extremely important to correctly sum up the experiences of the 20th century and make those insights known broadly among the people. But there is an idealist air of classic utopian socialism about Avakian’s work on this: as if we can show people how to act now by fleshing out fully (from our current imaginings) details the future society must adopt.

On one hand, this involves a wrong understanding of class struggle under socialism. And on the other hand, this approach directs the attention of the party and the masses now aggressively toward issues of “re-envisioned” communism, leaving many questions of this moment’s struggle for socialism unexamined and undiscussed.

Take the theoretical speculation made on the future transition to communism, and compare it to the glaring poverty of theoretical work that has been devoted to many other core problems of the specific revolution we need to take responsibility for: on the struggle to create a revolutionary base, on deindustrialization and the situation of African American people, on the entwining of the revolutionary processes across North America, and a dozen other ignored questions. Why does a movement that emerged from the 1960s have such a muffled voice when it comes to society’s raging controversies over ecology and sexuality?

Let’s go a step further using a specific example: Where are the theories of culture, the literary criticism or even discussion of television that any real revolutionary movement would need? Where is our Yenan Forum[65] for this generation’s multimedia world? Where are the works (or even serious commentary) on film, philosophy, geology, geography, linguistics, physics, and more? Where is any analysis or visionary exploitation of the Internet and all the dizzying opportunity in the new media?

This lack of theory and commentary connects with real shortcomings in practice. As we wonder why there are no Kreuzbergs in the U.S., we also have to ask: Where are the poets, the novelists, the beloved songs, the shocking films, the cartoons, the jazz riffs inspired by a revolutionary communist outlook? Where are the video game designers? How has the RCP trained, squandered or dissuaded the artists who came to it or who emerged within its ranks or who are just “out there” working in society?

There, undeniably, are a few people, projects and theoretical works that could be listed in answer to all this, but what does it say that there are so painfully few?

Meanwhile, there is that glaring disconnect between all this talk of “wild and wooly” debate in a “re-envisioned” future society and this party’s current grim press for ideological singularity.

Who could emerge from this party’s training prepared (or inclined) to creatively lead in the riptides of mass debate that will accompany any real revolutionary process or future socialist society?

In the end, the RCP’s promises of fresh materialist analysis are not realized. The past remains heavily mythologized, the present is crudely simplified and hyped, and the newly “re-envisioned” future serves as justification for idealist methods.

The fetish of the leader is rooted in the fetish of the word. The fetish of the word is the platform for the promotion of the speaking man. These problems really are epistemological.

This body of work displays a clear streak of subjective idealism — a celebration of will, a distance from practice, and a marriage between the self and the idea. The compulsive self-referencing of Avakian’s work (that everyone finds so odd) is the result of seeking to painstakingly situate his every new theoretical remark within the grid of his OWN previous body of work — not mainly within frameworks of his audiences or the rich explorations others make around us.

Reality is a tough judge: You can run on vapors. You can hide problems using denial and info diets. But in the end, the truth will come out. That was true for Lysenko.[66] It was true for the RCP’s faulty 1980s predictions of “world war or revolution.” It is true when the preachers around us swear “we live in the end times.”

Let’s critically re-visit On Practice together. Let’s critically consider what comrades in the international communist movement are saying philosophically. Then let’s open it up and re-find our path.

Immigrant workers rally for legal rights with a Catholic mass in county fairgrounds, North Carolina.

Photo: Mike Ely

The RCP has given prominence to Avakian’s atheist polemics against religion. These are important topics. There needs to be a lively militant atheist-materialist pole raised among the people and in the fight against political reaction. This is after all a highly religious country, and this is a political moment when fascist forces of the Religious Right have been seizing positions of power.

However, Avakian’s analyses of religion have a distant, schematic, and reductionist quality. These works show little interest in the specific social and historic roots of people’s religious faith — and why particular religions have such power among particular communities. There is little appreciation of the complexity, sophistication and diversity of what people actually believe. And quite frankly there is little respect for the people and little real understanding of why many believe — or why some don’t.[67]

The problem is methodology: As Avakian dissects Christian fundamentalism and the “Christian Fascist” political movements, you can’t shake the feeling that it is done without really knowing the people or their beliefs. I don’t mean just personally knowing — but the deeper scientific sense of knowing. There is a necessary substratum of research, investigation and the summation of political practice that is largely missing here.

For one thing, you can’t actually understand people and religious movements (not even “fundamentalists”) by relying so heavily on a close textual read of their holy scriptures. And a communist understanding of political fundamentalism can’t be developed by just reworking lots of secular-liberal exposes of theocratic political trends. You can’t speculate that a Christian theocratic political order is coming without studying the real historically-specific political obstacles to both centralized fascist power and the establishment of state religion.

I spent most of the 1970s among West Virginia coalminers who (as most people know) include many born-again Christians.[68] This is personal experience, admittedly from quite a few years ago. But it was experience and it has left me with a sense of the living contradictions surrounding religion and the cultural wars.

Here is Avakian on the causes of religion:

This view attributes religion to a mix of ancient ignorance plus the later ruling class manipulations. It profoundly underestimates how deeply religious faith is rooted in the needs and desperations of people’s existence. Faith and religious community are rooted in the search for consolation and meaning.

Those religious impulses are then shaped by very specific historical experiences and simultaneously by the ideological operatives of various classes in society (including, but certainly not limited to, the ideologues of the ruling classes).

To take one example: The adoption of Christianity by enslaved African people in America was not just the result of enforced ignorance or the forced indoctrination by Christian slave-owners (though both were involved). The mass conversion of slaves to Christianity happened as part of larger religious movements that swept across the U.S., sometimes in the face of resistance from their immediate owners. In the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, African slaves and freemen flocked to camp meetings held by traveling white Baptist and Methodist preachers, some of whom were convinced of the humanity of the slaves (a then-radical idea) and of the slaves’ subsequent need for salvation. As they embraced Christianity and as they established churches, Black people shaped and reshaped Christian worship — in both form and content — marking it with their dreams and accommodations and, in some moments, creating a gospel of escape or emancipation.

The defining elements of Christianity were certainly codified over centuries by ruling class ideologues. Many core messages Black people received via Christianity reinforced and justified oppression. The Christ of the Bible preaches “turn the other cheek” to the oppressed. Slaves were told that that African people were “the descendants of Ham,” condemned to be “servant of servants.”[70]

But at the same time, the “spirit-filled” worship and music of plantation churches was carried over from West African cultures and they developed through the creative work of once-African people. The Christian fervor by many African American people over the last two hundred years is rooted not mainly in the imposition of “false consciousness” from without, but in a deep need for ecstatic relief and mutual consolation in a horrific world.

Avakian often points out (correctly) that science can satisfy the human need for “awe and wonder.” But religion is not just born from that outward-looking desire for context and amazement — but often in the painful inner despair of loss and powerlessness.

Marx understood this and his assessment is a sharp contrast to Avakian’s:

I think back on many intense discussions with fundamentalist believers — where I would dig into the absurdity of a loving God allowing innocents to suffer, or into the scientific absurdities of Genesis. While I was thinking I had “really pinned them down,” my friends often turned to me in exasperation to say, “Look, this is really not the issue. I feel Jesus as a living, healing, guiding presence in my heart.”

In fact the attraction of born-again Christianity includes an ecstatic “personal relationship” — not just the certitude of absolute biblical truth and attraction of reactionary morality in a world of “turbocapitalism.”[72] And getting at that personal attachment requires upholding Marx’s dialectical materialism over Avakian’s superficial rationalism.

You can undermine brittle dogmatic religions by using their inconsistencies. You can pry some individuals over toward communistic atheism that way. But you really can’t touch the potency of religion if you don’t appreciate the source of its influence.

You can’t challenge Christian morality by crudely equating it with venality — with Old Testament “horrors” or the ugliest “traditional values.” You also have to deal (in truly dialectical ways) with Jesus’ admonitions to “love your brother” and “turn the other cheek.” You have to deal with grace, redemption, forgiveness, reconciliation, charity and hope for blessings — in other words, you have to all-sidedly deal (critically!) with what actually attracts people to Christian teachings.

Further: Religions are not just scientifically “wrong” world outlooks — but are also the rituals, traditions and cultures through which people identify themselves with historically constituted communities. Look at the stubborn Catholicism of many Irish people or the tenacious Judaism among dispersed Jewish people — who are often not particularly drawn to the supernatural.

There are no gods who hear our muffled cries. No one should expect divine blessings or miracles. The meek will not inherit the earth. But that doesn’t mean religion is simply self-deception or that communities of people don’t reap real benefits by organizing themselves into congregations.

To return to my previous example: Can anyone hope to deal with the gap separating communism from the radical sections of Black people without appreciating the reasons why many African American people are so deeply attached to their churches and faiths?

Surely we have to understand the historic institutional role of Black churches, as economic support, as a political voice for a voiceless community, and even as the wellspring of world-changing music. Yes, those churches have been a force for accommodation and even reactionary purposes. But how can we evaluate all this if we don’t understand that religion (including the Black church) has had progressive and even revolutionary currents all through history. Let’s understand well the armed preacher Thomas Munzer,[73] the slaves’ prophet Nat Turner,[74] the last Puritan John Brown, and the still-beloved Sheik Bedreddin.[75]

The RCP has recently promoted the observation that “The Bible Belt is the lynching belt” — to suggest that violent racism is one of fundamentalist Christianity’s bedrock “traditional values.” But this approach lacks a sense of both history and dialectics: Christianity of the southern Bible Belt is not just the religion of the lynch mob — but also of the lynched. This is because the Bible Belt and the lynching belt is centered on the Black Belt — the former plantation areas of the deep South (what Black people called “the soil of our suffering”), a place where two distinct nations and national cultures cohabited in gruesome ways. Christianity there includes the African American churches.

Quite a few Black churches uphold some reactionary social values (including most recently in the controversies over abortion and same sex marriage). However, the gospel of the African American churches is obviously not marked by the “traditional value” of white supremacy. They have often interpreted the story of Jesus to explain, validate and inspire their own struggle for survival (including against the horrible threat and impact of lynching).[76]

Part of the problem with the RCP’s current approach is the fetish of the word — here taking the form of overestimating the value of textual readings. When fundamentalists say that they take the bible literally, a dialectical materialist can’t take that statement literally.[77]

Sometimes secular people read the barbaric punishments advocated by the Old Testament and assume that fundamentalists “must” uphold this or else disavow the Bible. This is exactly what Avakian teaches.[78]

But in fact, many fundamentalists explain that (in their actual theology) there were different “covenants” with God — including a Mosaic Covenant (in the Old Testament) that was then replaced by a New Covenant brought by Jesus (in the New Testament). They often uphold some passages and insights of the Old Testament (like the Ten Commandments), but basically are not “bound” by its details or general moral tone.

In other words, conservative Christians have, long ago, cobbled together various theological ways of dealing with the contradictions and barbarism of the Old Testament. There is a long-standing conflict between that Christian fringe which literally believes in stoning people to death, and the broader ranks of fundamentalists who think those folks are nuts (even while they often condemn sex outside marriage in their own ways).

Their world is NOT rocked when the RCP naively points out that the Old Testament calls for stoning sinners. “After all,” people would explain to me, “Jesus stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman and said ‘let those without sin cast the first stone.’“[79]

With a few exceptions, the RCP ignores such distinctions — and at the street level, RCP activists (following Revolution newspaper[80]) imply that executing gay people or disobedient women must be the program of the Religious Right today (and even of fundamentalists generally) because (after all) “that’s what the Bible says.” But it is wrong to functionally ignore the complex shades and divisions of faith.[81] You can’t act like fundamentalists (or even the politically active ones) are inherently or generally inclined toward literal theocracy[82] or (at the same time) imply that fundamentalists are essentially the only real Christians because of their literalism.

To actually understand the political programs (and shades of program) among the Religious Right forces (or anyone else), you have to do some real work of investigation. And you can’t just analyze the text of their programs — you have to analyze their actual living political movement, and what its driving contradictions are (which in real politics often lead in directions quite different from stated intentions.)

Related example: Over many years of writing about elections for Revolution and the Revolutionary Worker, I was often amazed by how literally some within the RCP assumed that the stated program of bourgeois politicians represented what they actually intended to do. I sometimes thought, “This party is the only place in society where the statements of lying politicians are actually believed.” Again: the fetish of the word leads to overestimating the analytic value of close textual reading.

It is certainly true that some powerful ruling class circles have deliberately trained, financed, promoted and empowered extremely reactionary Christian fundamentalist forces. In many ways that process has reshaped these forces and even reworked their theology. It is true that the Religious Right has a common program: they generally want to “bring religion back into the public square,” erase the separation of church and state, funnel tax money into their ministries, replace state social programs with church programs, and promote vicious reactionary values in opposition to the ‘60s values, science and progressive thinking. It is true that one piece of that movement literally wants a fascist Christian theocracy. All of that is true, dangerous and quite alarming.

But it is a huge leap to claim that a Christian theocracy is literally in the works, or that no other organized force has comparable political initiative within the ruling “pyramid”:[83]

Here is one of those places where a necessary substratum of research, investigation and the summation of political practice is missing.

You want to put forward an analysis of trends toward fascism in the U.S.? You need to analyze their actual movements (inside and outside the ruling class), their history, sharp internal contradictions, and what they would actually have to knock down (not just ideologically, but institutionally, legally, structurally and politically). We would also have to hear and debate, in its own right, the underlying theory of fascism.[86]

In some ways, the RCP’s analyses lack a living sense of history — in ways too typical of American political thought generally. Yes, we should be outraged that evolution has been under attack in some target school districts and that it is being widely deemphasized in biology textbooks — but to understand this (to contextualize it) we need a historical perspective to this long struggle over evolution. Yes, we should be outraged that a chunk of the Republican Party thinks the Democrats should be criminalized as traitors — but don’t we need a historical understanding of how and how much that has previously been true — from Joe McCarthy’s demands for purges in the State Department, to Oliver North’s comments about “the Communists in Congress”? How can we really specify how much the pace is quickening and how much new force the fascists are gathering without a living sense of where all this comes from?

Another example of particularity: German and Italian fascism in the 1920s arose from deep political currents that were infatuated with a powerful central state. But American fascism (in most of its many popular forms) has always had a powerful anti-centralist streak. This is rooted in the whole history of slavery and frontier — and in the resultant politics of “states rights” and lynchmob localism. The fascist right in the U.S. (from the David Duke South to Oliver North-type officers, to James Dobson’s “pro-family” movement, to the thugs of “Free Republic” and more) have significant unity around militarism, draconian punishments, opposing immigration and a vicious vision of “traditional values.” But there remain some deep structural fractures (among them, and between them and more mainstream conservative forces), when it comes to specific, centralized codification of culture, religion, and government tracking of people.

The religious diversity of this country (and of the Religious Right itself) makes it hard to institute a single national theocracy. This is not Franco’s mono-Catholic Spain. The separation of church and state was never conceived as a protection of secularism, but as a federal accommodation to religious diversity. Theocracy is imaginable in some areas where one religion predominates, like the southern Bible belt or Utah. But wherever you have real religious diversity (including Judaism), that diversity re-creates the (very American) structural pull to institute policies (including future abortion bans) in a leopard-spot localist way within the existing federal framework.

Is the current arc going towards a specifically theocratic form of fascism? Are the possibilities really so either/or? Aren’t many stages and outcomes possible? Have we no respect for the role of political accident and the real-world mediations of necessity? The current fascization[87] of society may accelerate and there may well be sudden leaps if there is another 9/11 event. But the Christian fascists were always a minority wing of the Bush ruling coalition, subordinated to forces like Cheney and Rumsfeld. And clearly the Christian fascists’ top level influence has been in flux with new inroads in the federal judiciary and setbacks in other areas, all as elections and change of regime approaches. Even if something close to fascism comes (and it might!), the process, outcome and contradictions will likely be quite different from the cartoonish Handmaid’s Tale[88] the RCP keeps projecting.[89]

It is right to sound an alarm in the U.S. If, for example, new acts of warfare erupt on U.S. soil, we can expect some dangerous tightening of many legal, political and even cultural restrictions — and even a growth of popular support for such tightenings. There could well be reversals in long-standing legal norms. Such changes could well make revolutionary politics even harder to pursue. And there could well be a vicious reversal of abortion rights ahead. It is quite reasonable to discuss all this in terms of a fascist danger, and a process of fascization.

Not enough people are facing the danger. The theocrats are a real threat- as part of an even larger spectrum of fascist threats. But the RCP’s specific analysis and predictions betray a real inability to dig deep into the actual history and particular dynamics of this country. And that reflects badly on their larger project and method.

Cite Soley, Haiti.

Photo: TMG

In April 2007, the “Special Issue” of Revolution dedicated to Avakian announced, “There has never been a leader like Bob Avakian in this country.”[99]

This may well be true. Avakian is a visible tree on a parched political scrubland. He has put his stamp on this generation of communists in the U.S. But that does not necessarily make him “a Lenin.”

And no matter how highly we esteem and value a leader, the communist movement this person leads has the obligation to deeply, collectively and critically evaluate the theories, analyses and plans put forward, no matter who the author of those ideas is.

However, before the core theses of Avakian’s synthesis were ever debated, understood or even elaborated (including before any real discussion of “epistemological break” or “solid core with a lot of elasticity”) — it was formally asserted to the RCP that the “appreciation” of Avakian’s work has become a “cardinal question” for communists and that the outlines of communism’s new synthesis “is there for the taking.”[100]

This was argued on the basis of a specific discussion of the “relationship between simple and complex.” It was said: It is possible to understand all theoretical matters at different levels — on a simple basic level for beginners, and on a deeper and complex level later on. And, it was argued, communists had to acknowledge that many of them accepted important doctrines of communism (like the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat) on a quite simple basis, at least at the beginning, often without having yet looked deeply into the details, controversies and history surrounding the concept. This was then used to argue that communists can and should embrace (on a “simple” basis if necessary) the theory that Avakian’s leadership has become “the cardinal question” within the movement.

This is what country people call “buying a pig in a poke” — meaning: embracing something without close scrutiny.

Advocating that a whole movement accept a new ideology (in this case, a still-unelaborated synthesis of Marxism) on such a basis imposes an unscientific method upon that party over precisely the most defining questions imaginable, and over matters that should precisely be vetted in the most full way possible. In short, this argument around “simple and complex” was used as a call for acceptance on faith.

It is further asserted with great energy that communists need to “Have the humility to be led.” There is (of course) nothing wrong with humility. But in context, this campaign has been an assault on critical thinking and the RCP’s righteous old slogan, “Communists are Rebels!”

A scientific method demands that we evaluate all ideas (including Avakian’s) against reality — that we not assume the correctness of whatever Avakian says (or of whatever he will say). Revolutionary leaders have to “prove it all night.”[101] And all communists have the responsibility to evaluate the concepts, methods and plans of their leadership and party.

Honestly, this kind of supervision has never been a feature of the RCP. Obviously there is a range of practices within any organization and generalizations don’t apply to all experiences and places. But there is something about the party’s specific overall conception of democratic centralism — with its militarized view of organizational discipline — that routinely squeezes out wrangling or collective research on major matters. Democracy in this party is conceived as little more than “a chain of knowledge” passing opinions upwards for consideration in the deciding centers. Security is routinely misused as an instrument of control and information diet.

Some burning political questions are “opened” briefly in a highly limited way, others are never opened at all. It is worth looking at the RCP’s views on homosexuality as an example of this.

From 1970 until 2001, the RU/RCP[102] held that homosexuality was incompatible with revolutionary communist goals and ideology. Gay men and lesbians could not be members. Formal programmatic statements held that homosexuality would be abolished under socialism through ideological struggle or “re-education.” The party’s wrong and backward views became rather notorious through the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis exploded and the Republican Right sought to exploit anti-homosexual bigotry.

What is less well known is how such views were maintained. In the early 1970s it was said that gay people couldn’t be communists because they were a security risk of blackmail.[103] Then after the party’s founding in 1975 the stress was on ways homosexuality was linked to “bourgeois degeneracy.” Then after 1988, the argument was that homosexuality had to be rejected because male homosexuality was (supposedly) inherently hostile to women, and lesbianism was (supposedly) inherently a manifestation of lifestyle reformism.[104]

In other words, over the first thirty-plus years of the RU/RCP, the end verdict (the incompatibility of homosexuality with communism) remained the same, while the public justifications for that position morphed with time. And there were essentially no open discussions of these views allowed within the party’s ranks, though controversy and debate increasingly raged around the party’s youth brigade (RCYB).

By the late 1990s, these anti-homosexual politics were so controversial (inside and outside the party) that it would have been impossible to create a new program without major changes. The question was opened briefly but then shut down when the discussion proved highly volatile.

The method used for cutting off this debate is revealing: The new party analysis acknowledged that homosexualityis not inherently counterrevolutionary,[105] but insisted that the Party’s long-standing condemnation of gay people had not come from any influence of anti-gay bigotry. The error, it was said, came from general problems of method and reductionism, not from anti-gay prejudices within the Party.[106]

It was officially argued that the question of homosexuality itself had never been a cardinal question, but the method used to criticize the party’s previous position had to be considered a cardinal question. Translated: The party would still not consider the previous anti-gay errors a huge deal, but it would consider any discussion of possible homophobia among leaders to be completely intolerable. Also considered hostile to the party: Any discussion of why the change in line had taken so long, any appraisal of the huge political cost to the revolution because of this error and any discussion of “the closet” within the party (i.e., ways that secretly gay or bisexual members may have been forced to deny their sexual orientations).

In short: The party had adopted a new (and truly better approach) to homosexuality, but slammed the door hard on any real exploration of anti-gay bigotry among communists and its real-world consequences.

What emerges from such methods is a party where discussions are maddeningly confined and ritualized. They generally take place only after positions (or even a whole new synthesis) have been formally adopted. Questions are “opened” so a new orthodoxy can replace an old one, and then discussions are slammed shut again. Throughout that process ready agreement is expected. Real dissent is assumed to be backward (or worse).

Without a healthy climate of ongoing struggle, a party’s life cannot be an engine of new ideas, mutual supervision, and new levels of party unity. The actual process in this party codifies a deep distrust of debate (except as a means of indoctrination in official positions).

Such training sharply undercuts this party’s ability to even hear other voices.

Whatever else we now do together, let’s not repeat any of this.[107]

The RCP correctly (if too quietly) criticized the notion of “jefatura” that emerged from the Communist Party of Peru. It was seen as wrong that Peruvian party members should swear their loyalty or subordination to the person of their chairman, who is seen as being above the collectivity of the party and portrayed as a living guarantee of victory. It was correctly argued by the RCP (in connection with Peruvian line controversies in the 1990s) that new lines and sharp departures needed critical evaluation, and the key issue should be “line not author.”

The new formulations of the RCP are not identical to the PCP’s. But I cannot, for the life of me, see any difference between the PCP’s disastrous dogma of “jefatura” and the RCP’s new refrains that “this is the new party of Bob Avakian” and “appreciation of the Chair is the cardinal question.” Can anyone point out any real difference?

The assertion of “Avakian as the cardinal question” is whateverism.[108] It is a blank check signed in advance by the collectivity of party leadership. It is inherently slavish and metaphysical. It denigrates the test of practice and violates any scientific approach to ideas. And it inevitably unleashes a party culture of sycophancy and cynicism.

Let’s talk about the cult of personality in its own right.

Bob Avakian wrote in 1984:

A decade later, he agrees with himself:

This only gets it half-right. Meaning: he gets it wrong.

You can promote revolutionary leadership and authority in ways that do not unleash critical thinking and initiative. You can promote awe and slavishness. You can unleash a cascade of elitism and disrespect that showers down through your own organization with far-reaching consequences.

What Avakian downplays is that there has been sharp struggle among communists over what kind of authority to give leaders, and over which world outlook should imbue the way leaders are viewed. The style and content of Avakian’s promotion, its formal assertion of specialness, is connected to the reasons his party as a whole does not hear other people and disrespects its own rank-and-file. It is rooted in errors of line.

This question can’t be explored here in the needed depth. But I want to contribute to the larger discussion by raising Mao’s little-known struggle against “the genius theory” — because of ways Mao’s approach contrasts with Avakian’s.

Mao Tsetung, in Yenan base area during the revolution.

In the late ‘50s, new leaders of the USSR were knocking down the authority of the revolutionary past. They focused their attacks on Stalin. Mao responded in 1958:

“There are two kinds of cult of the individual. One is correct, such as that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the correct side of Stalin. These we ought to revere and continue to revere forever. It would not do not to revere them. As they held truth in their hands, why should we not revere them? We believe in truth; truth is the reflection of objective existence. A squad should revere its squad leader, it would be quite wrong not to. Then there is the incorrect kind of cult of the individual in which there is no analysis, simply blind obedience. This is not right. Opposition to the cult of the individual may also have one of two aims: one is opposition to an incorrect cult, and the other is opposition to reverence for others and a desire for reverence for oneself. The question at issue is not whether or not there should be a cult of the individual, but rather whether or not the individual concerned represents the truth. If he does, then he should be revered. If truth is not present, even collective leadership will be no good. Throughout its history, our Party has stressed the combination of the role of the individual with collective leadership.”[114]

Mao and his followers started to talk about “Mao Tsetung Thought” in the 1940s. It is a historical fact that this assertion of a new synthesis came after Mao had actually started to lead millions on a new road toward liberation, after he was actually leading both an army and expanding liberated zones in the midst of revolutionary war. Mao’s theoretical innovations were worked out and tested in that living practice of making a revolution. They were the dividing line within that movement between revolution and several wrong lines (including Stalin’s).

Mao did not declare his own words “historic.” He actually made history.

Then in the mid-sixties, Mao consciously used his existing prestige and authority to promote a new and less-well-understood program for the next stage of the revolution. When millions of people rallied to his banner in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), it was politically significant that they already loved and trusted him as tested, visionary emancipator. There was nothing artificial or crudely self-declared about it.

At the same time, fierce struggle erupted over how Mao would be presented and how his line should be promoted. And in that struggle, Mao fought the so-called “genius theory.” The RCP, which has written much on Mao’s last battles, has only mentioned this Maoist campaign in passing references.[115] Let’s rectify that.

While Mao was unleashing millions to “storm heaven” during the Cultural Revolution, powerful forces within his party were straining to channel everything into conservative directions. Already in 1966, Lin Biao[116] was using a “genius theory” to promote awe of the state and its leaders.

Lin claimed that:

Later Lin raised Mao even further:

In essentially religious ways, it was argued that Mao’s work was a supreme “pinnacle” or “acme” of communist thinking. Lin said,

The writings of other communist leaders (past and present) disappeared from the study lists after Lin declared:

Even statements that are true (literally speaking) helped emphasize obedience over conscious understanding. For example, Lin Biao said:

This contributed to a trend of rote memorization (in contrast to scientific study, application and deepening understanding).

Communism’s anthem, the Internationale, has a famous phrase that rejects the idea of supreme saviors. At one point in China, the song was rewritten to cut that phrase out.[119]

Starting in 1966 Mao was called Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander and Great Helmsman. And soon those “four greats” were formally required in official statements. Respect for a communist leader was being twisted into enforced public rituals of praise and deference.

The struggle over these ideological matters came to a head with a political offensive by Chen Boda, Lin Biao’s ally. Chen came to a major party meeting (the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee in August 1970), and demanded that the agenda be thrown out. He insisted that the party leadership should adopt this notion of genius as a cardinal question. In a related organizational move, he insisted that a new emperor-like post of “state chairman” be created for Mao. This amounted to the first step of a coup d’etat, in which an arrogant military-fascist cult of obedience would be imposed on once-revolutionary China and an institutional framework for military dictatorship would be put in place.

Mao fought back by sharply repudiating this genius theory.[120] After days of struggle, Chen was beaten back. In April 1971, Mao started popularizing his rejection of the genius theory — as an opening shot of his struggle with the Lin forces generally. Mao told regional leaders:

There are obvious parallels between what Chen Boda and Lin Biao argued and what the RCP promotes around Avakian. But I am leery of using analogies crudely. So let me note some differences instead:

● Mao had a lot of truth in his hands. Mao Tsetung Thought emerged from critical examinations of the Soviet experience, deepened by the lessons from decades of revolution, war, and state power. By contrast, I think Avakian’s synthesis has significantly less truth, and is methodologically distanced from practice.

● Mao did not deny that there were outstanding leaders or even geniuses among humans. But he opposed an incorrect method of describing and promoting his leadership: the particular “genius theory,” the ritual “4 Greats” and the stress on blind obedience. In the U.S. unfortunately, it is Avakian himself who formulates the theory concerning “caliber” and enforces those ritual words about a “unique, rare, special, and irreplaceable” person.

● Chen Boda and Lin Biao’s theories were raised and then repudiated in the throes of a great revolution. Now we encounter their ghosts under very different circumstances, and the repudiation is just getting started.

The best revolutionary leaders need to be known, valued, and followed. Their correct methods should be emulated. There are times when leading directives need to command great authority and quick action. There are periods when key leaders are objectively irreplaceable. And clearly, great efforts should be made to anticipate and defeat “decapitation strategies.”

In that sense I agree with Mao’s point about “revering” leaders.

At the same time we should not adopt any theories of a tiered humanity — with a formal insistence on the specialness of some people. We should not embrace the phrase “cult of personality” the way Bob Avakian does in his memoir. The word “cult” means organized worship, and worship is opposed to our social values and materialist outlook.

Leaders and the defense of leaders are necessary for real material reasons. But there is no material necessity to make cults around communist leaders. There are important reasons not to do so.