More Unofficial Notes: Thoughts from the Outside on March 9
Posted by Mike E on March 13, 2008
A crew of people in NYC went to the RCP’s March 9 event — and brought with them leaflets announcing the 9 Letters to Our Comrades and this Kasama site. That event was billed as a discussion of Avakian’s New Synthesis — and since the 9 Letters are the most substantive engagement with that synthesis so far — it was natural to hand such leaflets out there out before the event.
Jed had done the same a week before at Revolution Books’ hurriedly organized discussion of the RCP’s 13-year-old Leadership Documents that represented an earlier attempt to ramp up the RCP’s cult of personality around Avakian. At this bookstore meeting Jed came in after leafletting, and listened to the presentation.
A week later, on March 9, the RCP leadership had decided to ban Jed, who has helped write the 9 Letters and is a well-known revolutionary activist who has been “around the RCP” off and on for decades. As several different people demanded to know why Jed was stopped at the door, they were given little explanation. In any case, Jed (as he explains here) got a chance to think as he stood outside the church chatting with people as they came and went. Here is his view from outside.
* * * * *
by Jed Brandt
If I had to sum up this same-old-shit packaged as the next-new-thing: You can’t open a door by banging your head against the wall.
I wasn’t allowed to attend the March 9 event in NYC.
I was told I wasn’t welcome, that I could not enter St. Paul’s church to observe this event. No reasons were given to me.
I know of one veteran comrade who turned around and left when the people manning the doors confirmed this, and I know some of what that man has contributed to the revolutionary movement in this country. He was shocked. He just turned around and left.
For those following these discussions in the cities where this season’s edition of the Bob Avakian Show has yet to play – my advice: ATTEND THE EVENT. Listen, take it in. Ask your questions to. And if you think they are going to change this channel any time soon. You are mistaken. ATTEND. Listen to the rap, it’s twists and turns and insistence.
Will this synthesis and method bring revolutionary change in America? Will millions of folks finally wake up and realize, after enough ads in the New York Review of Books (or wherever) that this is what they’ve been waiting for?
Is this method of leadership actually leading? Who is it leading and influencing? The RCP is putting everything they have into these events: what is the result? Is it really happening? Is this “world historic”?
Is it opening the range of the possible, or resulting in a locked-down, thin-skinned climate of control and frankly fear. Not intimidation in the crude sense, but that short-circuiting of critical thinking that allows us to separate truth from a truth claim?
Is it bundling, with no back-up, the claim that there is literally no difference between communist leadership in general and the particular culture of appreciation (aka cult of personality) around Bob Avakian?
On what basis can it be claimed that Avakian is indispensable, a cardinal (answered) question among communists, when no revolution on earth – or even popular movement and sentiment – has ever put any proof to it?
Should those who think a little beef is in order be excluded from not only membership in this organization… but apparently the right to attend events and simply listen?
Is having an analysis (even a good one!) of the history of the ICM the same as being an indispensable political leader in terms of running an organization?
What is the impact on the effectiveness of this organization when they are burning bridges with the very sections of the RCP set who have blunted the disastrous effect of the cult of personality?
How is the Engage campaign going, by the way?
How many academics and intellectual leading lights (or anyone really) have cited Avakian’s work in any sense whatsoever? (caveat: blurbs don’t count)
What exactly is this man offering the rest of the world in terms of some new, necessary “synthesis” that justifies the refusal of this party to carry out any reporting or analysis on developments in South Asia… for years? To say nothing of initiating (or even suggesting) solidarity projects, anti-imperialist efforts to blunt U.S. intervention… etc.
Oh, I could go on. I had four hours to stand in the cold wind whipping off the Hudson river. I had a ton of questions. But the funny thing is, I wasn’t even planning to ask one myself. I just wanted to listen and observe. Instead, I spoke with around 40 people outside – far more than I would have if I’d just gone in and sat down in the back of the church. I spoke with some for a few minutes; others just words in passing, a handshake or embrace. Still others watched their own shoe laces as they passed by.
Those conversations were interesting. And to every person who took my hand, offered thoughts or concerns: thank you. I tried to attend this event out of respect to many of the individual people in that room, true lovers of the people trying the best they can to make a contribution. To those who could just talk like human beings, in solidarity or not – thank you.
redflags said
This is an open forum.
My name is Jed Brandt.
I would like an entitled supporter of the RCP to say publicly, above a plausibly-deniable whisper, why I was not allowed to attend this event.
I believe that it was less about me, my relationship to Mike Ely or my participation in the Nine Letters project than it was a teaching exercise for the RCP set.
It was to show that lines have been drawn. That this is real. That there are consequences.
Shunning. Do you know what other section of the population practices shunning? Fundamentalist Christian churches. Orthodox Jews. Muslims are cast out of their communities. This happens to people. Of all faiths. In fact, patriarchal faith requires it. Not all the time, but it has to happen to seal the bond.
God said to Abraham
kill me a son
Abe said “God
you must be
putting me on”
God said “no”
Abe said “what?”
God said “Abe
you can do
what you want
but next time
you see me coming
you better run
Yeah, someone boo’d, I say with dismissive sarcasm.
Those who attending this event, people who believe in freedom, did so when someone – anyone really, but in this case me – was excluded for having a developed analysis critical of Bob Avakian’s mandated cult of personality around himself.
The engagement the RCP seeks is, at this point and in effect, indoctrination and not developing and sharing a revolutionary, materialist method. It cannot stand serious interrogation.
I call bullshit.
Is that why I was excluded?
Let me not speculate. The RCP doesn’t approve of speculation, or the sharing of people’s actual experiences. That kind of talk, the very lifeblood of collective politics, is what they cannot allow. Because they are brittle, because the people in charge know this better than anyone. There’s no there there.
If Avakian settles for a second-time farce of the Wizard of Oz, then they can’t be that shocked at little old Toto.
I call bullshit. It’s over. The RCP is already over as a serious contender in any political sense. This Avakian cult shit is literally repulsive. Don’t take it from me, comrades. Look at your own experience.
If anyone out there thinks it’s going to swing, or that they will be organizationally reformed, while under the direct and apparently world-historic leadership of Bob Avakian, then you confuse who’s pulling the coach with who is driving the horses.
If they accuse me of trying to destroy this party, I say plainly that I am a revolutionary. I am a proletarian internationalist. I am dedicated to bringing a better world out of this madness.
I will not shut my mouth, or write some silly little note to be read by very special eyes alone (if even). I won’t give up changing the world to reform or “fix” a rump organization that has already broken down in all the senses that matter.
I will flicker the lights, make a final salute and send out a last call to comrades not to waste the rest of the night. To think through what’s what and reach out to people looking to go forward.
We are in the world. Here we all are.
The discussion isn’t happening in the RCP’s micro-managed mini-forums. I wasn’t excluded for anything except to regulate RCP members are allowed to say and hear. I wasn’t being excluded. The members and supporters of the RCP were… from not me. From reality. Avakian is building a closed cipher. That’s not what the RCP was. It’s what it is becoming.
Don’t mourn. Organize.
Real discussion is happening everywhere around this organization except in those claustrophobic semi-colonic 4-hour talks about talks.
My feelings weren’t hurt. People have asked me that, but no – not at all. One guy let me down. The whole affair made things easier, and conflicted personal feelings are now much smoothed. It was cold. I wasn’t dressed for it, it hadn’t seriously occurred to me that they’d keep me out. Now I know better.
———
Justify my exclusion. This is an open forum. Refusal to engage is mandated cowardice.
taste the reality said
You are complaining for getting “erased” from a communist event/community? Welcome to reality buddy. This is what communism is ALL ABOUT! If they could erase Trotsky getting rid of you will be nothing at all.
redflags said
That’s so funny, buddy. Because I’ve been actively involved in the reality of the communist movement in this country since I was around 14.
It’s a big world… the entirety of your experience is one (real) piece of it.
Forgive me if mine is not the same.
But that’s worth mentioning. I’ve excluded people from events. Three groups, not ironically all of which identified as some form of Trotskyist. I’ve never even been all that interested in that encapsulated universe. None it really, but a particular variant is quite aggressive and genuinely parasitic. I mention them because I think certain types of behavior are quite fine to exclude. If groups engage in that behavior on a national basis as a matter of habit: they don’t have to ply their trade on my time.
Sparticist League
For spreading lies once, another time for a laughable attempt at muscling me (without any actual muscle).
Revolutionary Workers League
For two days of obvious and intentional disruption of an open conference. If I’d been running security I would have removed them all after 5 minutes. Now that I know, and recognize those shady games I’d exclude them at the door. If they even still exist.
Revolutionary Student Group
The meeting where SLAM was formed, a small group I dubbed the Sexy Sparts was disinvited after confusing our meetings with their organizing. I’m still friends with three of them, all of whom outgrew sectarian campus Trotskyism in pretty short order.
I’ve tossed people for drinking or smoking weed where it was inappropriate. But for disagreeing?
Communists are rebels. Debate is our life blood. It is how collectives think, all kinds – not just communists. Debate is nothing to fear. It is how we think.
I believe it is okay to ban cops, press, derelicts and yes, even outside groupings.
But they are literally begging for engagement and some kind of real recognition, and when they get it are literally dumb-founded.
Again, I don’t feel excluded. I’m not complaining. I just want an entitled member of the RCP to justify their policy, applied uniquely to me.
I call bullshit. Justify my exclusion. This is an open forum. Refusal to engage is mandated cowardice.
taste the reality said
Hey man, I guess they just didn’t want any part of your parasitic encapsulated universe. They don’t have to justify it. Deal with it.
redflags said
I am.
Andrew Stergiou said
Attentively I will attempt to understand these circumstances you write on though I am pressured for time; and merely offer a suggestion that”: What is written be more in a formal style where there is a summary is possible so one does not have to read all the article before understand the point striving for.
Best wishes.
~A!~
Andrew Stergiou said
PS As comrades, especially comrades of long standing they are obligated to addressed the issues to not do so is to fail in their revolutionary duty to resolve contradictions amongst the masses.
Not withstanding the cultural morass of western culture and their idiot lackeys and running dogs stating otherwise are not revolutionaries, nor human beings but brainless robots, automatons, and idiots without reasons to exist who should not criticize others. All too often in the last number of forty years socialists, revolutionaries, communists, nationalists, democrats have been pawns of the self-serving aspirations without consideration to them as human beings which can be summarized as produced by an intensified struggle to establish a world wide dictatorship or hell on earth where poetry is not allowed and the brain is brainless though all the fakers are given free reign.
bolsjevik said
Given the treatment Trotskyists and presumed Trotskyists, hell, anyone standing up for Lenin’s line against Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s . . . given the complete lack of factional rights and party democracy in the Soviet Union under Stalin . . . given the “brushing out” of Trotsky’s image even . . . I find it funny you, as a Stalinist, expect “party democracy”. And don’t even get me started on Chiang Kai-Shek being made honorary member of the Communist International in 1926.
Big L said
I’ve helped to organize/host events with local chapters of WCW/RCP, in the past, where Spartacists show up – and they’ve never (in my limited experience) been kicked out.
It’s surprising (and telling of weakness?) that you were.
I recently organized an event where about a hundred people showed up, and within that group was a bunch of LaRouchians were there. I didn’t kick them out, but I did talk to them and patiently explained that if they were serious about their ideas they should organize their own forums/events and not parasitically mooch off of the organized efforts of others. Organize the unorganized. The LaRouchians wound up just saying one comment and keeping quiet the rest of the time.
I don’t see the point in keeping people out of events – even if they disagree with your politics, shouldn’t this be opportunity for debate and engagement?
redflags said
Just to be clear: I don’t think they were trying to “show me” or were in any way concerned about event security. It was a display of what will happen to those who didn’t show proper reverence.
Folks I’ve known for a long time, and have been on good terms with, were not able to engage in simple discussion. That’s why I was excluded, to demonstrate that this can happen to you.
Unlike some, I’ve never built my life from inside this organization out… I have friends and fam all over. I’m not afraid of shunning. I have a different conception of the revolutionary movement than Bob Avakian’s entourage, so losing that light isn’t the end of the world.
But for those inside the closed cipher of the RCP, who have spent years (and even decades) the idea of a break isn’t just a political issue. It’s not just about “line”. It’s about “everything.”
Ivy said
From: The Role of Dissent in a Vibrant Society by Bob Avakian
“…it’s not enough to hear positions characterized by those who oppose them, it is necessary to hear ardent advocates arguing for these positions. This relates to something that I think we have to incorporate more into the dictatorship of the proletariat and the rule and transformation of society by the masses of people. And this goes along with not just tolerating but encouraging dissent: we have to allow for people to explore many different ideas, and to hear advocates of many different ideas…”
No commentary needed.
nando said
the shunning policy is new — it corresponds with the arrival of “BA as cardinal question” and the general re-emergence of farrago methods around the party. It emerged before the 9 Letters, but was applied to people leaving over the imposition of this cult of personality. Previously people who left the organization were encouraged to work in the “mass initiatives” — Refuse and Resist was packed with ex-p people who treated it as a new home and a kind of RCP lite. But now the policy is to sharply “cut all ties” — i.e. shunning, and specifically forbidding ex-party people (who leave now, over this particular cardinal question) from working with this party in any capacity. (People who left earlier, over other issues, are still allowed to do political work in various capacities in WCW etc.)
On the shunning policy:
I suspect people are right to say it is in part about punishing those who “leave,” and by extension threatening anyone thinking about leaving (including people who may have to leave spouses, relatives, lifetime friends, supportnetworks, political work that they have done for years etc.)
But it also serves a large function: It seeks to hermetitically seal of the faithful from those doubts that are now congealing into a coherent M’ist criticism. It is a measure of the info diet.
And (as this site reveals) those methods are utterly 20th century — you can’t enforce such an info diet without a state (and even then you can’t run an economy without having the world leak in). the RCP’s attempt to dismiss the 9 Letters without mentioning them per se (let alone engaging them respectfully) will simply fail. Everyone I talk to is reading them and talking about them, and sharing them. And longtime party supporters in various areas are (my friends there are telling me) quietly encouraging people to “compare and contrast” — which, in context is leaving the barn door open.
Shunning is wrong. And will fail. Not engaging is wrong. And totally hypocritical from those who claim “no prooftexting and open to interrogation of others.” Banning Jed (though a small matter on one level, after all they didn’t beat him) is emblematic of their defensive terrified stance — they are (as someone said) brittle and losing.
I met many of you for the first time on 2changetheworld — and the fact that all that interactie discussion and community was shut down, instead of expanded, is telling. Instead we get a stiff “Question and Answer” where you (the audience) as a few chosen questions and we (the specially chosen ones) provide Avakian’s answers (or else are struck dumb if we aren’t confident of what he would say). And this was called ‘wrangling’ on their announcement?!
What kind of wrangling is that? where are the open mikes? The lines of people speaking and answering each other? the pre-release of the thesis being presented so we can come prepared with REAL questions.
And what was new in this presentation? Anything at all? they got together a couple hundred people (who have mainly been reading nothing but Avakian for a couple years) to hear yet another presentation on the Avakian theories they have been studying all along? And when a few questions are raised about other very prominent left authors (Althusser, gramsci etc.) the chosen ones couldn’t even address the issue on THE MOST BASIC level. How can you claim “a breakthrough” if your theories have been “on the books” for forty years (i.e. the relative autonomy of the superstructure?) or for 200 years (making reality the criterion of truth?)
Everything about this operation — in method, in content, the morale of the audience, the forced applause, the selective door policy, the constraint on discussion, the absense of anything fresh — speaks of the crisis and the situation.
I’m sooooo ready. What’s next?
zerohour said
Ivy -
Good point, but don’t you understand, that’s in the future.
Chuck Morse said
Nando says: “I’m sooooo ready. What’s next?”
This touches on something that I don’t understand: instead of walking away from the RCP, why aren’t those committed to building a Maoist party trying to change the RCP’s policy on Avakian? (if that is, in fact, the major source of people’s discontent). I know that there is no democracy in the RCP, but there must be some way to press for a change. Right?
Is it that people here no longer believe in building a Maoist party? Is that the issue?
zerohour said
Nando -
“But it also serves a large function: It seeks to hermetitically seal of the faithful from those doubts that are now congealing into a coherent M’ist criticism. It is a measure of the info diet.”
Compare this with how they treat other critics of the Party who would raise the same criticisms, in some cases with harsher tones, but who do not have long-standing or intimate experience with the Party. If things get hairy with “outsider” critics, Party supporters can always fall back to a position that their criticisms are based on a false or mistaken idea about the Party. This will not work with those of us who are more deeply familiar with RCP’s historical, theoretical and practical terrains.
nando said
I am not surprised you don’t understand this chuck, because the question you raise is not simple, there is probably not simple agreement among most of us here, and for many of us the final answers are not yet worked out.
Let me break it down:
* clearly the explosion of Avakian’s cult of personality and the elaboration of a flawed synthesis was the exit point for many people (including many beyond those posting here.) Others left earlier over related issues (going back decades)… but there has been a pulse of disaffection. This has two elements: (1) the line has gotten more extreme and explicit, (2) it has become more consolidated, in the sense that it is not going to be reversed.
So this has been the impulse for bunches of us to say “this is my stop, this is where I get off” (to quote a phrase from the Gang of Four). In this case it is a matter of needing to get off at this stop in order to stay connected to both reality and the rev road — since this party is clearly spinning somewhere else.
* However, the impetus for departure is not the same as “the underlying problems.” The 9 Letters does not posit “the problem” as being those changes that came down in the last few years (“cardinal question,” “two mainstays,” APP, engage, blame the people, blame the party cadre, escalation of shrill arrogant preaching etc.)
Clearly there are long term problems with the whole project. That (if I understand it correctly) is the point of the discussion in Letter 2 — which says this party never succeeded in some of its most basic goals, of developing a social base, a serious network of “organized ties” in each city, a backbone organize core connected deeply to the people, a party transformed in composition etc.) These basic and necessary goals were NEVER met (despite major attempts) — and those failures are NOt the result of the recent line changes (and are not particularly connected to the cult of personality either.)
* My reading of the 9 Letters says that (at the very least) there is a problem with the particular conception of the “Maoist party” applied by the RCP. It has to be said that there are very DIFFERENT conceptions among Maoists — French Maoists (for example) were notoriously ambivolent about tight disciplined parties (and some of them, like Alain Badiou and Bettelheim saw the GPCR as fundamentally a revolt against the “party state” inherited from Stalin — even if Mao himself clearly didn’t see it that way or that simply.) and many of those forces did not form new tight leninist parties out of the 60s.
In the U.S. there was a particular view of the “Maoist Party” that dominated the NCM — which was that we would form disciplined parties out of whatever forces we could gather, go to take root among the people, lead struggle, do c. political work and EMERGE in the next upsurges and crises leading a rev movement.
This schema did not work… in part because there were no new major upsurges, but also because the little hardcore organization failed to connect with the people (it never “took root”) — not in the 1970s among industrial workers, not in the 90s among the ghetto youth, and not today among the “public intellectuals.” The various targetted social groupings have proved disinterested (and the party’s language, program, method, assumptions have proved basically flawed for the task).
* Further, in fact of this continuing isolation (and accompanying shrinking), the RCP developed a theory of “telescoping” — where all the accumulating problems (of isolation, small size, etc) would be overcome in crisis “in a telescoped way.” And the reason this would happen is because (and here the new shift in thinking) the core line, leadership and message represented by the persona of BA was so correct and irresistible. In fact a magical sense of “telescoping” started to replace a realistic sense of “accumulating forces” (that had animated the RCP earlier in the 1980s as it took up such work). The theory of “telescoping” is essentially a theory of magic…
And one of the contributions of the 9 Letters is that it explodes the myth that the bolsheviks are the example of that kind of “telescoping” — yes, they grew explosively, but they were already a major social force by 1905 (compared to the RCP today), and this growth was “not from nowhere.” The quote from Lenin has gone around about how “the masses come to the rescue of scores of revolutionaries” in exceptional times — but taken too literally this becomes a mythology that denies the real failure of “accumulating forces” and the fact that this continuing and unrelieved failure means that this party has no prospect for actually leading anything in the foreseeable future.
* So on one level, the 9 Letters is a shattering critique of the PARTICULAR version of the “Maoist Party” that has gripped the RCP — including a critique of its militarist “democratic centralism” that has now (in very un-maoist style) slid down the rabbit hole of monolithic singularity (in the name of solid core).
* I think we need to deepen our critique of that model of “Maoist Party” — which is (incidentally) not the model used by Maoists whenever they have been successful (in China, in Nepal etc.) in ways the 9 Letters points out in a few tantalizing ways.
* where that critique takes us is unwritten. but i suspect most of us start with the assumption that we are not jumping out of the RCP to form a new, similar organization with a slight phase-shift in political flavor. something different has to be conceived — organized, yes. disciplined, yes. with leadership, yes. but really different from the conceptions that have produced these tired and exhausted groupings with all-roar and no juice.
that at least is my initial answer. Anyone else?
tellnolies said
Chuck,
I think people here have a variety of ideas about “what is to be done.” Some are probably thinking in terms of building another Maoist party and they can answer your questions as to why they think the RCP can’t be saved from within (though I do think that has been addressed fairly extensively here).
Personally, while I think there is much to be gained from the study of Mao’s thinking and while I also think we need a revolutionary organization that can do many of the things commonly associated with the idea of a “party” I am not wedded to building a party as such, Maoist or otherwise. I’m not neccesarily against having something that is or calls itself a party, but I do think there is a pressing need to really rethink the sorts of organizational forms that are most appropriate to the conditions we face today. I’m much more skeptical that anything that identifies itself as “Maoist” is going to be able to do what needs to be done, but at the same time want to resist the facile dismissals of all the things that come under that rubric that characterize anarchist/social dem/liberal engagement with this major piece of the revolutionary legacy of the 20th century.
What excites me about this site is precisely the openness of people here to such questioning of recently held certainties.
What I’d really be interested in reading is YOUR thoughts on what sort of organization with what sort of basis for unity is needed and why.
Chuck Morse said
I appreciate your replies, Tellnolies and Nando, although (for me, at least) they raise more questions than they answer.
Nando: you’ve identified a lot of the RCP’s failings and problems, although it’s still not clear why you believe that the RCP can’t be forced to change course. Why can’t you organize a campaign against Avakian and for a policy shift? I’m not suggesting that you should, but there must be some way to pressure it. Why not do so? Would you prefer that it simply collapse on its own?
Also, as I understand it, you endorse a “critique of [a] PARTICULAR version of the ‘Maoist Party’ . . . [and] its militarist ‘democratic centralism.’” What does that mean exactly? What type of Maoist party and what type of democratic centralism do you support?
Tellnolies: How deep is your skepticism about the viability of party building and Maoist organizing? Do you believe that the RCP was destined to fail (given that it was/is wedded to these things)? Or do you think that conditions were once ripe for a Maoist party but no longer are? If that’s the case, what social changes have undermined the relevance of Maoism and party building in the US?
nando said
could BA be ousted or knocked down? Absolutely not. This line is locked in. and that is why criticism is now public. They announced “force opposing lines out of the party.” and then act with shock, when those opposing lines find expression out of the party. But no, for all kinds of reasons there will not be a policy shift, the party would literally shatter first. that’s because the previous and various contending lines have been finally defeated, and there is only one voice left in the room.
On the other point: don’t put words in my mouth. It’s neither clever nor helpful. I was obviously critiquing their militarist “dc” — not endorsing it or some slight variation.
I think we need a disciplined organization — eventually. One that emerges out of real life today, with deep ties and a fresh project of creative contemporary evolution in thinking and action. i think it needs to have lively internal life and debate — and yet have the ability for a high degree of common action. I don’t use the phrase “democratic centralism” because (as others have said) it has been “exhausted” — it comes tailing so much baggage that using it causes more confusion than clarity.
all of that (for me) is Maoist — even while it is in sharp contrast to the kinds of formulaic assumptions some associate with “Maoism.” I don’t think politics or life is about identifying glib little phrases, formulas, schema, verdicts, and universals and imposing them on living matter. The 9 Letters calls that confusing the popularization with the actual theory and method.
and by the way, I don’t believe the RCP was “destined to fail” — i think a number of creative approaches were applied and the best understandings people had were tried, and that they could have emerged from all of that with some real re-thinking. (The Nepalis did something of that order, and even in their own way, the peruvians). Instead BA’s forces conjured up magical solutions and have now dug in around those solustions — but it certainly need not have (inherently) gone that way (even though there were naturally and understandably flaws as it emerged in the 1970s, as there always is in real life projects of all kinds.)
I also don’t think conditions are ripe for a new party, but that one will be needed at some point as the rev movement emerges. trying to force one into existance prematurely (based on apriori programmatic line alone) would be a dead-end (first time tragedy…) What the eventual organization(s) should look like (what it would be called, how it would be structured, what its style and methods should be) is unwritten, and will emerge out of the process we are now starting. I put an “s” on organization, because i assume that different currents will arise out of any real process, not just one. This is not a process to congeal an organization. It is a process to discuss key questions that confront us all.
chegitz guevara said
Nando,
Your second post was very difficult for me to read. After every sentence or two I started thinking. It took me much longer to get through it than it would simply take to read a similar number of words. And it was an excellent encapsulation of the 9 Letters.
Thank you for a delightfully thought-provoking post.
your comrade,
chegitz guevara
SUN! SURF! SOCIALISM!
redflags said
Here’s another thought:
The issue of “projecting” Avakian is basically preparing Avakian and his most immediate entourage for life after the RCP. He has already run this organization into the ground. I think it unlikely that they will be able to launch another national initiative on the level of an October 22 Coalition, World Can’t Wait, or Not In Our Name. Too many burned people, too much general revulsion at the mandated cult around Avakian…
Lacking the ability to actually… you know… lead, Avakian will shortly “come out” as an individual with an entourage of signature gatherers/PR flacks. That’s the point of all this academia fellatiatics. Avakian is demanding a status that he never earned to segueway into life after the party he has, in effect, destroyed already.
This is speculation, trying to make sense out of what appears irrational.
tellnolies said
Chuck,
I don’t think Maoism was EVER an adequate basis for building a viable revolutionary party or other organizational form in the US. Rather it was what a large fraction of the New Left and oppressed nationality movements latched onto as a result of a combined (and largely correct) identification with Third World liberation movements, sense of the exhaustion of pro-Soviet Marxism, and privileging of the mobilization of political consciousness over economic determinism. As such it is probabaly best viewed (within the US context) as a neccesary moment in the development of a revolutionary politics, but ultimately inadequate. I don’t like to speak of inevitability, but insofar as the RCP was stongly predisposed to resist challenges to precisely what is most problematic in Maoism, I think it would have been very hard for them to avoid something like their present fate.
Its important in saying this, however, to acknowledge that there are lots of reasons why this might not have been instantly apparent to people looking for a way to chart a revolutionary path in the US. The embrace of Maoism of one sort or another by the Panthers and other revolutionary groups based among oppressed nationalities and the international prestige of the Chinese Revolution into the 1970s gave it a gravity that no other revolutionary current could really match. Its also important to recognize the breadth of perspectives and strategies that were able to lay claim to Maoism in order to appreciate the way in which it framed a genuinely lively debate on the part of many thousands of people looking to build a revolutionary movement in the US, that is to say the way in which it was experienced not as a cramped and dogmatic collection of rigid formulae, but as a force that liberated people by giving them a language to talk about things that were effectively prohibited within the other languages available to them.
Its easy, and I would say cheap, to look back on the party-building frenzy of the 70s and to mock the stilted and self-important sloganeering and crude theorizing that would indeed quickly become ossified, without appreciating how really bold it was for so many really young people to attempt to build a revolutionary party here and to take the Chinese Revolution (rather than, say any number of European models of revolutionary left organization) as their point of departure.
nando said
redflags:
If you think BA and company are planning for failure, you are not paying attention. If you think they are doing this to slide into academic celebrity you misjudge the enterprise.
they are actually grappling (iin their own way) with the problem that for many people “it doesn’t exist if it isn’t on TV” — this country allows a white noise of plurality but keeps a grim grip on what gets “seen” in the heights of mass media. avakian thinks the public intellectuals are people who (a) have some access to the media and a public audience and (b) have sections who can be convinced to help hoist him into public view, and (c) have a long term importance for the project of building a new society.
And that is what they are doing… they also think BA is their “best face” and most powerful implement — i.e. that if he connects (as directly as possible) with people it will be “life changing” — and the core of a new re movement can/will emerge from that interaction, and that the accumulated verdicts of the last decades (“communism failed” or “communism is a bummer”) can be overturned by promoting his new synthesis.
That is why his synthesis focuses on a “new” communism/socialism — both because it is more attractive, and because they think this will provide the broader support and consciousness needed to prevent restoration.
all of that has been debated and basicaly refuted here on this site.
But this isn’t about transition to a post-party world. The party IS over, but these folks are not planning to turn out the lights themselves and going clubhopping.
zerohour said
I think we have to re-think the whole idea that a revolutionary communist organization has to be designated as “Leninist” or “Maoist.” I thought about this as I was reading Alain Badiou’s essay, Politics: a Non-Expressive Dialectics:
“And finally we have the famous sentence of Lenin about the very heart of Marxism: “the masses are divided into classes, classes are represented or expressed by parties, and parties are [hold] by chiefs. So finally we have something which goes from historical action or historical [?] of masses to some proper names. The name of a big chief is the symbolic expression of all the becoming of the political process. Technically we can say that to go from the moment of creativity of masses to a real consideration of contradiction of classes we have to be under the potency of the proper name. And it is why all the political tendencies of the last century are under proper names: Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Castroism, and so on.”
We should learn all we can from the contributions, and shortcomings, of revolutionaries. It is typical that we refer to their politics by their individual names. This has served as a convenient shorthand for a set of positions and problematics, but hasn’t it played a restrictive role as well? I think Lenin and Mao made some important advances that we should study, build from and break out of. How much creativity has been stifled in the name of combating “revisionism”? I was once speaking to a Party supporter about quarks being the smallest individual unit of matter scientists have found, and it may be indivisible. He would not accept that because one ALWAYS divides into two. It might ultimately be true but there is no such evidence yet. He admitted that he did not know the science but took his position out of philosophical preference. Presumably, giving up this position would be the first step in giving up Maoism.
Can we build a revolutionary communist organization that incorporates the theoretical breakthroughs of various thinkers, including non-communists, without being eclectic?
When I get a chance I will write more but I wanted to put this out there.
Jaroslav said
Nando: Great, thought-provoking ‘initial answer’. Could you elaborate more on the proposed organisational forms of the French Maoists you spoke of? Also when you spoke of China & Nepal, it occurs to me that one aspect which could be very applicable to the imperialist countries is their methods during preparation for PW. I must admit that on China, I know very little about this. Most of what I’ve read is about the PW or the socialist period, & critique of the attempt to do city insurrections. But how did they build forces & ready themselves to launch PW in the first place?
Redflags: I disagree with your hypothesis on BA’s supposed post-RCPUSA plans. He & his closest comrades/followers actually believe this stuff, they really think they’re right. In a funny way, this is kind of similar to the debate about capitalism & ecology. The capitalists are running their own habitat, the very thing which allows them to live (& to be capitalists), into the ground. Some of them realise this, but most are so blinded by their own supposed ‘success’ (but how do they measure that) & worldview & inertia that they just keep doing what they been doing, because they really think they’re right.
redflags said
Nando – I think we agree, and that you’ve put the “positive” program to what is up. Thank you for clarifying the point I was trying to make.
leftspot said
I obviously don’t know the actual reason they decided to exclude Jed from the event. But I’ll put forward my guess. Anyone who has seen Jed in political activity knows that he has many strengths and talents – one of the sharpest of which is as an agitator in mass meetings. If there’s anyone I know who has a knack for knowing the precise thing to say at the precise moment to turn a room full of people around, it is Jed. I would have to guess that the folks staffing the door of the event knew this, and decided that if Jed had wanted to turn the event upside down, he might have been able to do so…and they decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
This is certainly not a mark in the RCP’s favor, since they claim to want ‘engagement’ and all that. But I can’t say I’m surprised. I would take it as a compliment.
(Which is not to say that exclusion always equates into a compliment for the political line or skills of the excluded; as Jed mentions in his comment giving examples of exclusion of some of the more annoying Trotskyist groupings, some are rightfully excluded for the idiotic nature of their disruptions, not because they represent a real political threat. I am just making a guess as to why Jed specifically was excluded in this particular context – and have to believe it is because he was gaged to be a real political threat to getting the event’s message out in the unimpeded, unchallenged way the organizers of the event seem to have wanted)
LikeARainbow said
Jed, I traveled from the midwest to New York to see this event, and since I am fairly new to Communist theory, I was excited by some things Wolff said-largely because they spoke to Comm in a general sense, not because it referred to Avakian. I’ve been reading his stuff for some time and the Paper and BA have never resonated with me as being particularly…uplifting or new, and they’re very linear. In one Letter, the RCp method is described as ‘read BA, tell people about it, they will ‘get down’ with us’–excellent description. My experience with some very good People in Detroit is that there are no real community roots.
I’m sorry they barred your entrance, comrade. I am truly disappointed.
Pavel said
Sometime around 1979 BA appeared on the >Tom Snyder show. Revolution newspaper recently included Synder in its 2007 obituary section, praising him for having invited Bob (although as I recall, after the filming they were pissed off at the talk show host for somehow making their man look bad.)
I thought at the time that the show hadn’t gone well at all, that BA seemed nervous, spoke twice as fast as necessary, had on jewelry that screwed up the microphones… it was generally embarrassing. If he comes off that way once hoisted into the “superstructure” of the mainstream media, it will not help the RCP.
Anyway, I’m wondering if it would be possible to put up that video on this site, just for study purposes.