Misuses of the Erotic: Debate Among Revolutionary Youth
Posted by Mike E on September 21, 2008
painting by hei fok
The following cues from topics opened on the thread “RCP’s Anti-Homosexual Line: Why Held So Long and Stubbornly?”
* * * *
“Training members to curtail their dreams, fantasies, and aspirations was part of the means by which the party leadership controlled the membership. It also has to be understood as pre-figurative in terms of how the RCP’s leadership viewed the relations between the masses of people and the party-state leadership of a future (ostensibly) proletarian state….Whatever we do, let’s not do that ever again. We should also not treat this simply as further proof of the RCP’s failure. These are not closed books – and the relationship between politics and the personal are hardly all figured out.”
* * * *
by Jed Brandt
The RCP’s position was better understood as fear of the erotic, not banal homophobia. From the English Puritans of the early bourgeois era, to the 1936 Soviet illegalization of abortion and homosexuality, through to the Communist Party’s hostility to the 1960s revolution in culture, to the RCP’s position –- there is a long-standing problem among revolutionaries towards pleasure, intimacy and “non-productive” relations. It’s still a problem internationally, though the recent recognition of a “third gender” in Nepal strikes me (with little complete knowledge) as an advanced step in the right direction!
The problem with the RCP wasn’t simply missing the boat on the changes in regards to gay people in America over the last forty years – it’s deeper than that.
It’s that they fundamentally don’t get or care to get the question of agency and how it relates to socialism. Socialism comes from the people – they are not objects to be corralled as faceless masses under the benevolent despotism of a party-state taking out “correct verdicts”. Questions of sexuality highlighted these issues because of their immediate reality. Sex isn’t waiting for after the revolution, as it were – and where the erotic came into conflict with the seige culture and asceticism of the RCP’s internal life, sex itself was equated with sexism. Good sex can’t and couldn’t be correct sex, because any desire (sexual or otherwise!) that conflicted with the 24/7 all-for-the-future mentality had to be squashed.
Training members to curtail their dreams, fantasies, and aspirations was part of the means by which the party leadership controlled the membership.
It also has to be understood as pre-figurative in terms of how the RCP’s leadership viewed the relations between the masses of people and the party-state leadership of a future (ostensibly) proletarian state.
Debate and Rejection: Chicago 1990
One story: Around 1990, when Queer Nation was “here, queeer and not going shopping”, ACT UP used direct action, participatory methods to unleash a community and identity politics were riding high, Refuse & Resist! had a meeting in Chicago over whether the RCP’s anti-gay politics were acceptable in their branch.
The meet-up in Wicker Park’s Urbis Orbis performance space wasn’t the standard gathering of the RCP’s periphery, but a larger conclave of the radical, young white left from the city’s artsy Northside neighborhoods.
Two RCYB members represented the RCP line, a couple very close supporters who worked in R&R full time were chairing the meeting and dozens of folks came, including a sizable anarchish contingent. After the meeting they weren’t all that “ish” and I watched as what was good, even precious, in the RCP’s politics, practice and potential get sacrificed on the alter of their sexuality position.
Hostility to the erotic was made, in RCP parlance, a dividing-line question — all assertions to the contrary. In the following months, the anarchists consolidated their position and virtually all of the independent radicals gravitated into their milieu. This meeting was emblematic of the national shift away from revolutionary politics to a kind of oppositional, cultural autonomism that became knows as anarchist or anti-authoritarian.
But back to debate: it was one of those real wrangling sessions that radical activists hunger for. I was hungry for it.
When I joined the Brigade a few years earlier, I had a fairly typical hostility towards homosexuality. Macho, stupid, fearful. Having lived in both Greenwhich Village in New York and the North Halsted Boystown area of Chicago, I became familiar with “out” gay people. This daily experience with emerging queer culture during my own heterosexual adolescence humanized and de-mystified relationships that are too often buried in fear and hate.
I learned how people ran from small towns all over the midwest to find freedom in these gay enclaves. Many of these young people arrived to a city without friends and worked as hustlers, prey to chicken hawks and even killers like Jeffrey Dahmer who prowled the very streets I walked on my way to school. Drug addiction went hand in hand with self-hatred. AIDS was visibly killing a whole generation of men.
And while the Brigade didn’t tolerate words like faggot and certainly had gay, lesbian and bisexual members – the underlying orientation was for the party-led elimination.
How could we be liberators when we feared and disrespected sexual freedom, when our leadership demanded we ignore the real breakthroughs happening all around us?
The Brigaders I knew, including one who supported the anti-gay line publicly, were opposed to this position. All of them. Though, as with marijuana smoking, you could tell who was working towards party membership by their changing behaviors and positions. When someone quit smoking weed, they were on their way. When they started mouthing gay = ideology nonsense they were going down that rabbit hole.
People were engaged with the issues, many had not only personal experience but also a commitment to radical politics and theory. Leaders from Queer Nation attended, as well as some of anarchist “non-navigators”, to crib a term from Ken Kesey describing the de facto leaders of supposedly leaderless groups.
Not one person save those under discipline upheld the mechanical claims about sexuality the RCP put out; which, in short, were that desire was simply ideological choice, that homosexuality was intrinsically a concentration of generalized misogyny and that lesbianism was reformist, and gender-fucking was somehow reproducing male chauvinism (such as transvestism, butch/femme relations).
The discussion in Wicker Park began with clarifications of the actual position, which I can safely report did not help the RCP’s case.
RCP’s Early Argument for Re-educating Gay People
The key passage from the then-operating program of the RCP was that homosexuals would be “reformed” and “reeducated” under socialism. In the face of the AIDS epidemic and the brewing culture wars, the idea of a government leading the charge to eradicate homosexuality wasn’t just flawed or mistaken, it was monstrous.
Debate shifted among those present to how to deal with the RCP as an organization when they insisted on this reactionary position. This was a sharp issue.
Signs of the RCP’s Self-Ostization
Some opportunists within the National Lawyers Guild, connected with other sections of the left, had put forward motions that RCP supporters should be denied legal assistance from this long-standing association of radical left lawyers.
Speaking personally, I had just endured a felony trial in connection to protests at a military recruiting station around US intervention in Central America. And while I had never acted to harm gay people and had marched in support of sodomy rights (only won federally in the last few years) – I had been charged with assaulting a police officer and felt then as now that if the NLG couldn’t support a youth fighting imperialism and getting framed for assault, then we all would be in a big mess.
The proposal to preclude RCP supporters from broad support and legal representation wasn’t to be applied across the board. These same lawyers (including, quite hypocritcally, my own!) did not want to apply this prohibition to all left groups with f’ed up sexual politics. They were deeply involved in supporting radical nationalist groups with even worse positions! So anti-communism and hostility to multi-racial organizations found refuge in distancing the RCP based on their indefensible anti-gay clause. It was a tangled situation – the kind of place real leadership is needed, and the RCP was wrong on every point.
What that R&R! debate in Wicker Park showed me was the power of open discussion.
The room quickly came to a repudiation of the line, and over the course of a few hours agreed that the RCP’s work in total was pushing for radical change. It was noted that outward manifestations of bigotry were neither promoted nor accepted in the RCP’s ranks or activities – but that this was a carry-over from older left positions that we were ourselves unlearning and struggling against.
So “unity-strugle-unity” won the day.
It was heavy. I watched a comrade I knew and love, who I entered communist activity with, learn to uphold the wrong positions as the price of admission into the party. We were only teenagers, but we were leaders and took our commitments in all earnest.
Not long afterwards, this brother became a full-time cadre and we lost regular contact, for political and personal reasons.
I moved into the periphery of the RCP, working in and around their initiatives and upholding RC politics in the social movements and wherever I could. But doing the wrong thing should never be the price of admission to an organization with a liberation politic. Training the youth to lie, to uphold reactionary positions and to fear the kind of debate I saw that day is anathema to our cause. This position upheld through a dark period internationally and domestically cost the revolutionary communist movement an entire generation.
Whatever we do, let’s not do that ever again. We should also not treat this simply as further proof of the RCP’s failure. These are not closed books – and the relationship between politics and the personal are hardly all figured out.
Iris said
What a great post–thanks Jed! I have been thinking of the poor lines on queerness as a problem between communists and sexuality, gender dynamics and psychology themselves (things that are nebulous, varied and not easily controlled or ‘corrected’). I haven’t been able to put how I felt about it in words. This is a great place to start a discussion, and possibly do some historical analysis of sexuality in the ICM.
Iris said
Can someone explain how the aim for ‘safe spaces’ falls short, or isn’t a good political approach? I have seen a few people say as much in the last few days. It has become a part of my organizing lexicon, so to speak, because it is so commonly part of feminist political work–but I guess I’ve never thought much about it in a larger context.
Renegade Eye said
Very interesting post. Much to think about.
Areaman said
Iris:
There are many issues involved in the question of “safe spaces” (or “autonomous spaces”).
Clearly, it is important that women have “safe spaces” in society (on a campus, in the workplace etc.) where they are not subject to sexual harassment and worse. And this is a constant issue because (in this society and in the world generally) women and their bodies are routinely seen and treated as a target for unwanted advances, comments, disrespect, and rape.
So the question here is not whether this is a goal, it is of course an important goal: in the socialist society we want, a woman will be able to walk down any street at any time without giving a thought to rape, and without enduring degrading comments and actions. And, in fact, this has been the case in socialist countries (particularly china at the heights of revolutionary conditions).
However questions come up.
There have been a range of theories promoted that put forward the creation of autonomous spaces (within capitalist society) as a strategic road to replacing capitalist society. This was true (for example) in the large anarchist zones organized around squats in Germany (Berlin and Hamburg) — the anarachists had a theory of “frei raum” — free space — which they hoped to create through common culture, radical democratic collectivities and streetfighting.
And it has been a feature of how the Zapatista movement has been analyzed by various forces within the globalist movement — which stresses that the indigenous people (supposedly) did not “demand” autonomy within Mexico, but simply created it (using the EZLN), not needing to overthrow the corrupt government in Mexico City, but simply setting out to create the society they wanted in their own villages.
In different ways, using different language, it is often said (or implied) that people create their own freedom when they create zones (counterculture communities, self-help groups, campuses with strong hate speech rules) — and even that it is possible to create the societies we want while IGNORING questions of state and state powers. The idea being that we can create these “zones,” establish alternative culture and institutions within them, and grow those zones until they objectively challenge (and even just replace) the old society.
The issues with this:
1) It is true that it is possible to create areas under capitalism that can function as potential political base areas for the larger struggle (for power and socialism). In the 1960s, some radical communities (like Berkeley and Cambridge and the Haight) serves that way. Radical forces didn’t have state power there, the police still patroled. But there was a level of common agreement that created new norms on a higher political basis, and people were attracted to come there from all over — and in some ways they became strongholds of radical and revolutionary thinking, places from which struggle was launched, and “hostile territory” to the authorities who still had overall power. And it is also true, that in some ways and in some places, you can create “safe areas” for women and gay people — where the usual crap of society is kept out, and new enlightnened norms of tolerance, equality and mutual respect are struggled for. That is sometimes achieved (for example) by having a pro-LGBT dorm on a campus, etc.
2) But these things (while they can be important achievements, and can help develop organized, conscious forces for larger struggle) are not themselves a strategy for replacing the larger society — exactly because by themselves they can’t handle the issue of state power (and behind it the issue of an integrated worldwide system that operates on capitalism). Ultimately, it is the forces of capitalism who rule, through their control of the larger workings of society and through their monopoly of armed force. And until that changes, the various “zones” we may create are fragile, beseiged, temporary, and only partial able to affect the conditions established in larger society.
3) What we need is a strategy leading millions to seize and break up the existing state power and transforming all of society (BOTH using the conscious activism of the people in every institution, and also using the commanding heights of the society as an instrument of the revolution). In such a strategy, the creation of political base areas can have value. Movements that demand an end to the norms of this society can have value (demanding an end to racist and sexist harassment, popular patrols in times of serial outrages, etc.) Debates on campus about what is acceptable and what is not — can be part of raising consciousness about the fact that patriarchy is a pillar of capitalism. Base areas in the third world (Rolpa, Rukum, Chiapas, Yenan, Orissa, Bihar, Ayacucho, etc.) have historically been a way of creating an embryonic new state power, resting on revolutionary armed forces, to wage war on the ruling classes and their state. In imperialist countries, strong areas for the revolution (often poor communities like Kreuzberg in Berlin, or the “red suburbs” around paris, or nationalist communities in Northern Ireland) have been part of “organizing force for revolution” and even emerged as “no go areas”– even when it is not strategically possible to actually challenge and exclude the authorities by force quite the way it has been done in the Third world.
4) In short the issue is state power. You can’t “ignore” state power. You can’t “grow our zones” as if state power doesn’t exist. Either our strongpoints become bases for outreach and struggle — rallying others to the struggle against this system — or else they corrode and falter, and fall short of playing the potential they could. In the world today, it is not possible to create islands of liberation — especially within the existing nation-states — without sooner or later entering into a test of strength with that state.
5) And you are right that, in some ways, socialist states are themselves understandable as large “liberated zones” — operating within a world economy. However, socialist states have armies, they have production and national markets, they have places where they have overall hegemony for revolutionary ideas and policies…. and so THESE zones have a different character than a zone within a capitalist city, or a “no-go” area driving out police in Belfast. They are still surrounded. Their overall survival still rests on the expansion of revolution and the overthrow of remaining capitalism. But, there are still major ways that socialist countries represent a leap over mere “liberated zones” in a Third World countryside, or a serious of squats in a U.S. city.
The basic points:
* We either all get to communism or none of us do.
* Without state power, all else is illusion.
We are just touching on these questions, which really need to be developed more deeply — including by excavating the explicit arguments that emerged from the globalization (and NGO) movements that you could just “ignore” state power, and change society at the base piecemeal.
entdinglichung said
good post … may it also be possible, that the RCP was directly (biographically) influenced by an “evangelical” or “puritan” culture and simply gave this culture another label … btw, according to Dirk Krujit’s Guerrillas: war and peace in Central America (2008) the Organización del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA) in Guatemala saw no problems with “free love” in its ranks as long it was consensual, even under the conditions of guerilla struggle
nando said
Jed suggests that sexual matters were an instrument of control. You wonder whether it is simply absorbing certain cultural strains in the surrounding culture.
Here is what I think:
The RCP tried to move mountains — starting with limited forces thirty years ago (a couple thousand or so)…. they understandably had massive and ambitious goals.
The way you move mountains (as mao points out in his famous essay) is that you touch the heart of the people, because only they ultimately can move mountains.
So, over a long period of time, the RCP sought to accomplish these ambitious goals — but without successfully “touching God’s heart.” What emerged was a pressure (and an accompanying culture) of going all out — of “keeping the advanced element tense” — training people to throw all into the struggle, fear no sacrifice. Some of this was quite fine (and appropriate for a communist movement that serves the people). Some of this was based on constantly hyping the urgency and potential of each moment (in a method that, over time, developed a certain cynicism among people who had been pumped up over and over.)
But, in the end, the masses have not responded to the RCP’s methods and calls (for both objective and subjective reasons that need to be sorted out). And in THAT context, a method of cadre mobilization that sought to reach and activate the people, became (despite intentions) a method that objectively substituted the party cadre for the masses.
In a situation where new people generally did not “step forward” in large and growing numbers to take up the tasks of the struggles and the revolution — and as the number of cadre have declined over thirty years — the RCP responded by jacking up what is expected of its cadre, trying (yet again) to “touch God’s heart.”
This has led to campaigns on denouncing “alternative lifestyle” and on pursuing your own “passions.”
In the beginning, the ban on homosexuality was pretty crudely a tailing of larger social norms: “the workers” (supposedly) could not relate to gay lifestyles or the tolerant norms of campus leftism, and a movement that wanted to “reach the workers” adopted a romanticized view of the prejudices existing among the class. This was expressed (in the 1970s) in many ways — in a pressure to live in nuclear families, in pressure to adopt conservative dress (communists often cut their hair, while the more radicalized workers grew theirs out). and so on.
People have sex because it is fun and feels good, and because the intimacy creates a private realm of interaction between two people. And in the hyperactive culture of the RCP all of that was suspect to some people (as was drinking, taking vacations overseas, pursuing graduate school, “having a career” in a profession or field of academic research, buying a house, having kids and so on.) These things were often not formally forbidden, or uniformly discouraged — but there was a general ethic that anything other than the urgent-struggle-of-the-moment was probably something “done for self” — and a retreat from what was needed of communists.
This is a movement that more and more rarely had social events and parties — where members, supporters and new acquaintances could hang out socially and discuss informally. There is a disapproval of cadre spending time on their jobs, on family responsibility, on recreation and other interests.
There were several negative sides to these trends:
First, it created a model of cadre life that most people among the masses could not imagine themselves attaining — even if on some level, they often “admired the commitment.” People met communists, saw how they lived, and said “i could never live like that.”
Put another way: this was a party that rarely found the time or resources to help single working class mothers become active communists — there was no day care at meetings, there was little relief from a heavy burden of many evening meetings, few efforts at collective living situations… etc. There was a culture of being active on many fronts through the waking hours and so on.
This all arose (i believe) from pressures caused by the “lack of the masses” and it contributed to the extreme difficulty the RCP had in recruiting “among the masses.”
Second The hyperactive status of party cadre also led to their deterioration as communists. This party culture often (ironically) prevented many communists from reading (theory, politics, news) to the degree that should be “an inflexible task.” After years of demanding a restless devotion to “task’ after “task” — the party leadership then (rather bitterly) turns around and mocks those same cadre for “moronization” (i.e. that the hyperactive cadre at the base do not have the ability to understand the theory generated by those at the top.)
It reminded me of a bourgeois marriage: where the husband goes to work and the woman lives as his domestic servant and child-caregiver, and then he complains twenty-years-later that she has become “boring” and uninteresting as a “housewife” compared to more “worldly” women.
The RCP’s model of “what is a communist” is (ironically) the ultimate “alternative lifestyle” — and it is one few people can choose without severing many of the ties that embed them into communities, friendship circles of progressive people, and larger society. It involves living in its own bubble of meetings and activities — while squeezing out many real and necessary ties to the people.
Third, in words, this party insists that it “should” be possible to be a working artist and a communist, or be a working scientist and a communist — but that assertion collides sharply with the objective functioning of this party’s internal life and culture — with its wild swings from this project to that, with its arbitrary style of leadership which allows little give-and-take.
Fourth, all these pressures have now accelerated wildly (with the recent “cultural revolution” campaigns against “alternative lifestyles,” “working on molasses time,” “having an office space mentality,” etc.) so that numbers of long time cadre are being forced out (because of health problems, or need to care for children or unwillingness to quit their jobs, and related issues.)
Fifth, these methods don’t (can’t) solve the political problem: the lack of the response and support from the people. In fact they make it all worse — frantic activity, desperate outreach, few results able to be harvested by an organization living in a bubble.
What I’m saying is this: The uneasiness the RCP has around matters of sexuality is related to the uneasiness it has toward many elements of “ordinary life” and even toward very admirable pursuits outside politics-per-se (academic scholarship, research, scientific experiment, creation of art) — an idealist suspicion that activities outside the circle of party-led politics is all inherently tied to a bourgeois notion of self and to an inevitable capitulation to the status quo. It is part of an objective severing that has characterized this party where (as the 9 letters put it) the people are always “out there” and any connection with them is a foray into unfamiliar territory, over and over again.
Carl Davidson said
One reason the RCP and others get into a mess on this question is because of “proletarian ideology,” or any other ideology, for that matter.
To this way of thinking, everything in our minds is a subset of one or another ideology, ie, ‘every idea is stamped with the brand of a class.’ This is the road to the dogmatism swamp, and wearing a strait-jacket to boot.
Positing a ‘proletarian ideology’ contains within in it a coherence theory of truth, ie, for a notion or set of ideas to be truth in a “class way”, they have to be consistent with the overarching coda of ‘proletarian ideology’, a coda, by the way, to which no one has yet to lay out a commonly held set of laws and ideas, for the simple reason that there is none.
Back in the CPML, we too were told go go out and defend the line on homosexuals–lesbians as being plagued by extreme forms of anti-male ideas, and gay men as being plagued by extreme forms of anti-women ideas. I remember having to do this at a public forum in Colorado, where a number of gay leftist basically, and justly, mopped the floor with me.
Whatever the virtues of ‘defending the line,’ what was shameful was that I actually knew better. I had gay people, women and men, in my own extended working-class family. I knew damned well that ‘choosing a lifestyle’ had nothing to do with the way they were. They had no idea idea as to why either. But I knew them as loving and caring people who held no animosity to either gender. I also knew that there wasn’t any outrage or shortcoming of homosexuals that couldn’t be attributed to heterosexuals as well, perhaps even more so in some cases.
Finally, and most importantly, contrary to all claims of ‘proletarian science,’ I knew damned well that no one had the slightest scientific idea as to why or how homosexuals came into being, other than that they represented various points on an entire sliding natural range of what has made up human sexuality over tens of thousand of years in all social orders, and that all of variants on that scale where shaped, for better or worse, by the various class and gender orders they were part of.
This is one reason, although far from the main or only one, that I continue to argue for jettisoning the entire framework of ‘bourgeois vs proletarian ideology,’ and get back (or move forward) to Marx’s original notion of counterposing science to all ideology, a term representing the ossified ideas of old ruling orders.
It’s far better to have an open future, acknowledge that much of our world and the larger universe in still unknown, that a critical method of inquiry of what science actually does. This will push back the veil of ignorance over time, as well as refining, and sometimes even coming to reject, earlier notions of ‘iron laws’ and such.
We have truths that are subject to change and improvement, not ‘The Truth,’ proletarian or otherwise, thank goodness, and the sooner we proceed on solving the problems of class struggle and revolution on this basis, the better off we’ll be.
Mike E said
i have never understood the argument that the ideas of marxists belong to some special category called “ideology.” How is your world outlook, Carl, blending buddhism and various ideas from the Bukharin/Deng schools NOT an ideology?
To me ideology means (literally by definition) a body of ideas. And (in my view) all ideas in human heads are part of socially developed ideologies. (In other words, our ideas are not SIMPLY our own, or they would have little meaning including to ourselves.)
Isn’t the idea of opposing “ideology” itself an idea that comes as part of a larger web of ideology?
Now, on the question of “proletarian or bourgeois ideology” — it seems to me that the world is not so binary… that ideas are either one thing or another. Just as complex ideas are rarely simply true or false. I think we need to, generally, inject an appreciation of complexity and nuance into the categories of marxism — and understand that ideas are not fixed, and are not simply reflections of reality (or not), but that they have a social existance, a development — they are changing things that seek to describe and influence a changing reality
entdinglichung said
see also the article In Conservative Nepal, a Tribune for the ‘Third Gender’ Speaks Out from the NYT (19/09/2008)
Chuck Morse said
Has any communist party ever had a libertarian, permissive, tolerant, and open-minded orientation toward the sexual practices of its members?
redflags said
Uh, yes. What did Henry Miller say in Reds in reference to the revolutionary Bolshevik sexual ethos? “They were all fucking.”
Beside Miller’s approving wink, the range of thinking and practice has been vast. Communists have promoted reproductive rights, bringing birth control and abortion to free women from early pregnancy and removal from the public sphere.
And “tolerance” and permissiveness are not themselves always panaceas: the question is tolerant of what? Permissive of what?
Polygamy? Concubinage? The sex industry? Arranged marriages?
We have no call to be permissive of the most backward and exploitative relations – and every reason to struggle specifically for women to not be caught up in all these forms of submission and subordination. In China, this was a huge fight and while land-to-the-tiller was the first law, marriage reform was the second.
Many parties haven’t viewed sexual regulation as a priority, and this has always been contested terrain. Going back to the arguments about youth sexuality in the German communist movement, figures like Wilhelm Reich were articulate proponents of sexual liberation well ahead of their time. He also didn’t fit well with the Stalinizing sexual conservatism of the day.
Libertarian policies on sexuality seem to be “let the market decide” – and if we are satisfied with this, with mass prostitution in one form or another – what are we even fighting for? Yes to the full range of consensual, mutual behavior: no to the authoritarianism of commodified sex.
LS said
In response to Chuck’s comment #10:
A few quick examples.
The Communist Party of Cuba has in recent years rectified it’s earlier not-so-progressive line and is enacting some of the most forward-thinking and liberatory policies and laws on the planet in terms of LGBT rights. There are various articles about this on the Workers World website.
The Communist Party of the Philippines plays a leading role pro-gay mass organizations and recognizes gay marriages among its members including military combatants. There was a brief media splash around this a couple years ago when two New People’s Army combatants were married (around the same time of the tremendous reactionary backlash in the US against gay marriage, I think).
Here in the US, Freedom Road Socialist Organization is one group that has always had a good line and practice on LGBT liberation and is decisively against any form of exclusion or discrimination against LGBT people within the organization. (I know there are other groups with good lines, but FRSO is the one I’m most familiar with.)
From FRSO’s unity statement:
Iris said
I’m interested in what the views of other parties/orgs have been, and have a bit of an assumption about them being not-so-progressive–but that doesn’t mean I believe in ‘liberal hands-off’ approaches…
Linda D. said
Nando makes several important points. SOME of those I am repeating below. And while I want to emphasize that I am going to speak from my own personal experience, which has its own limitations, in the course of that, want to say that my experience was not unique.
I think part of the problem with the RCP’s inability to “touch God’s heart” was a disconnect and either romantic or pragmatic view of both the masses en masse and in particular, the working class. The view years ago was a petit bourgeois outlook of just who “God’s heart” was and is. This outlook was from the outside looking in, and didn’t just apply to the reactionary line on homosexuality. (Lack of theoretical struggle, and other points that Nando make are totally valid but that is not what I want to focus on right now.)
Nando:
“But, in the end, the masses have not responded to the RCP’s methods and calls (for both objective and subjective reasons that need to be sorted out). And in THAT context, a method of cadre mobilization that sought to reach and activate the people, became (despite intentions) a method that objectively substituted the party cadre for the masses.”
“…SUBSTITUTED THE PARTY CADRE FOR THE MASSES…”So true.
But in the 1970s, as Nando pointed out, it wasn’t just the pressures that he listed, in order to “reach the workers.”
This reminded me of “Mao’s Yunan Forum”—and to render Mao less profound– he criticizes artists’ portrayal of the proletariat as simply donning some overalls, or work shirts, “conservative dress” and that that was somehow by osmosis a substitution for “proletarian art.”
In retrospect, and as far as the RCP goes, my view is that much of their line at the time also had much to do with the line of “center of gravity”, and economism, that was represented most strongly by the “Mensheviks” not only in the party, but concentrated in party leadership. But in the end, still a petit bourgeois and romantic (ultimately cynical) summation of the working class.
I don’t doubt the RCP’s intentions and sincerity, but intentions play out in the real world, and those intentions need to be based on a materialist ideology, and take hold in the real world. “The road is paved with good intentions.” And the world of the RCP became more and more limited, living in its own self-contained bubble, and the RCP did substitute the party cadre for the masses.
(Some of this to me is exemplified with their line around “gay lifestyle”, etc. (Nando): “In the beginning, the ban on homosexuality was pretty crudely a tailing of larger social norms: “the workers” (supposedly) could not relate to gay lifestyles…” As if the working class was automatically, in sum, heterosexual. This is not to say that there aren’t real contradictions (and homophobia) among the people, or even “the real proletariat”, but to tail after the most backward ideas and contradictions is to me “a sin.”)
Nando: “This all arose (i believe) from pressures caused by the “lack of the masses” and it contributed to the extreme difficulty the RCP had in recruiting “among the masses.”
“In the beginning, the ban on homosexuality was pretty crudely a tailing of larger social norms: “the workers” (supposedly) could not relate to gay lifestyles or the tolerant norms of campus leftism, and a movement that wanted to “reach the workers” adopted a romanticized view of the prejudices existing among the class. This was expressed (in the 1970s) in many ways — in a pressure to live in nuclear families, in pressure to adopt conservative dress (communists often cut their hair, while the more radicalized workers grew theirs out). and so on.”
“People have sex because it is fun and feels good, and because the intimacy creates a private realm of interaction between two people. And in the hyperactive culture of the RCP all of that was suspect to some people …. These things were often not formally forbidden, or uniformly discouraged — but there was a general ethic that anything other than the urgent-struggle-of-the-moment was probably something “done for self” — and a retreat from what was needed of communists.”
In the very early 70s, if you wanted to have more children (or your first child) you were supposed to check with leadership first. Was having children going to hamper your abilities to be a thoroughgoing revolutionary? So I checked and went through a few meetings with my leadership and was finally told, “it’s okay” because so far having one child didn’t seem to put a damper on my political “work.” For the next almost 3 years I tried to get pregnant, but meantime, the “center of gravity” line had taken hold, and during those 3 years, looked like the majority of female comrades were pregnant and having babies. And why? Besides their own personal desires, that’s what the working class supposedly does—it has families, nuclear families, yada yada, and most of my female comrades were not checking with their leadership, like I had so dutifully done.
After the Menshevik struggle and split, suddenly I was being told BY SOME, emphasis SOME and certainly not all, of leadership that I had to “travel light” and if that meant abandoning my children, so be it. It was for the greater good. (I might add that those who were emphasizing traveling light didn’t have children.) IN A REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION, people are called upon to make great sacrifices, and more often than not they rise to the occasion. But since we were not (nor are we now) in a revolutionary situation, but were acting as such (and always told that situation could change at a moment’s notice), those monumental sacrifices were based on hype, and hyping up party cadre. And if you were in conflict (which was mostly unspoken) about suddenly abandoning your kids, well, you obviously didn’t have a clue about making revolution, nor did you deserve the revolutionary mantle. At the time, I ended up getting together with a few comrades who did have children, and we had a little list going as to who we could trust with our kids should we be unable to care for them.
But this is just one example of how most social relations were not only dealt with, but how havoc was wrecked even in the social relations amongst the cadre, let alone their relationship to “God’s heart.” I won’t go into all the various other particulars. The following is to me an understatement, but does express some of the bankruptcy of the RCP’s line around these questions:
“First, it created a model of cadre life that most people among the masses could not imagine themselves attaining — even if on some level, they often “admired the commitment.” People met communists, saw how they lived, and said “I could never live like that.”
Well, I think people often times don’t know what they are capable of, or how they would act in certain circumstances or situations. A lot of times people surprise themselves when the situation calls for their sacrifice and dedication, breaking with old preconceived ideas, even if they don’t necessarily comprehend the “entire” picture. But those pivotal choices and sacrifices are made in the material world, not just because some sect like the RCP tries to impose their view onto “God’s heart.”
Carl Davidson said
The problem, ‘MikeE,’ is that your notion of ideology as ‘a body of ideas’ is overly broad, at least from my perspective. Yours would have to include science in it, but that’s part of my point. Science is more than a ‘body of ideas,’ it’s also a method and a body of knowledge, which is slightly different than a ‘body of ideas.’ It’s also a meta-tool for changing a body of ideas.
We just have different meanings we apply to the term ‘ideology’, mine being ‘the ossified ideas of the old orders,’ which I’d argue is more in tune with Marx, and to which he counterposed modern science.
Modern science actually benefits all modern classes in various ways, but it benefits the proletariat most of all. At least that’s how I’ve come to understand both Marx and science.
Any given individual, of course, can have all sorts of things in his or her head–bits and pieces of old ideologies, firmly held dogmas, knowledge and methods of a scientific sort, images and opinions, half-hidden seeds of thought in the unconscious, and the most interesting of all, the ‘wild card,’ what George Herbert Mead called “The ‘I’ of the ‘Me,’” that ‘I’ that we can never turn around fast enough to glimpse before its shadow has gone, but is critical to self-consciousness, an emergent present and the experience of novelty, what helps us do ‘thought experiments’ to learn new things about a universe that is open, rather than enclosed in a semi-Hegelian ‘absolute,’ a body of ideas as ideology.
Our task is to tear down the ‘prisons of old ideas,’ to have people see the world as it is and as it can become. Of course, many ideas and creations that emerged in old orders are monumental achievements of human civilization–all of Mozart and Beethoven’s 9th, for example, not to mention Newton, despite his wacky religious notions–so we have to be careful when rebelling against the old.
As for Zen and some other Buddhist schools, it’s my personal preference of a tool to explore consciousness beyond the Veil of Maya, better and more sophisticated than most psychoanalysis. It helps you prepare for your own death and helps you help other with personal suffering apart from working for social change to do away with the social causes of suffering. And if you know much about it, it’s a nontheistic anti-ideology that subordinates itself to modern science, wherever there is a conflict. But it contains a lot of wisdom, for its purposes, which is what drew me to it; as Marxism does for understanding and changing the world, which is what drew me, and continues to draw me, to it.
macster nerr said
“it’s also a method and a body of knowledge” Which is derived from idea driven assumptions(repeatable results being one of them)
Also I agree that combining ancient eastern thinking with modern marxism is a sick joke. The Ancients really did no so much better. Mao is not on the same level of the old master.
Tammy said
Thank you for this post.
I was very dutiful, and my personal relationships and aspirations were all but crushed for many years. While with the party I internalized the following:
* Romance is escapist bullshit.
* It’s not a sacrifice if it doesn’t hurt.
* Wanting to do anything in your life other than assigned party work is selfish.
* We don’t have friends, we have comrades.
I should be clear that these were not presented as formal guidelines, but things that comrades said to influence each other, that reflected common attitudes.
Every relationship seemed to be valued solely on its apparent immediate practical usefulness (or lack thereof) to the revolution. I saw people (including myself) pressured to abandon family members and friends of all types and in many kinds of difficult situations, causing everyone to experience unbearable emotional pain.
As someone else here noted, people can and should be inspired to make extreme sacrifices in a revolutionary situation. But it’s wrong to normalize it as an everyday necessity. Who can bear it, year after year? Whom among the masses would want to have a life like that?
A friend once asked me, “If the party treats its own members like shit, how are they going to treat all of us once they’re in power?”
redflags said
My friendly advice, regarding “ancient eastern thinking” is to learn about it before just assuming that because it’s old its worthless. Just as much wisdom and insight is found in monotheistic religious traditions – that only a fool would trash in its entirety, so too with Buddhism. Putting Carl’s larger political orientation to the side, which I admit isn’t always easy to do, there’s more there than fatalism and a yearning for nothingness. I’ve found it much richer with insight than original sin and redemption, no doubt… The danger is in the yearning for balance, and finding oneself in the stream of life rather than learning to swim, but that’s a different discussion.
redflags said
Tammy, I’m sorry for what you and many have been through.
It’s not “political” – this demand to stifle the heart. In psychology its called sublimation, and its a dangerous game. The felt need to “keep the advanced tense” can be summed up as manipulation. Just as a democratic centralism that is literally an individual and his most intimate sycophants’ ability to suppress even rudimentary communication in a self-declared revolutionary organization is unpardonable. It has wasted not just the lives of people, who are burned out by design and then denounced as cinders – but has sabotaged and trashed what was truly the last great attempt to build a revolutionary internationalist party in the heart of the global empire.
Avakian may be high on his own supply. For the rest of us, we don’t just need to detox: we have to chart the uncharted course, look around for who are our friends and who is our enemy… and start again from where we are. The old ruling certainties will not come back. Not economically, politically or culturally. It is in this time of uncertainty all around that conscious, committed and organized revolutionaries can help the times find their melody. That’s not hype. It’s true, and as Carl did say in another context… “it’s not crowded up front.”
Tammy said
Thank you for saying all that, Redflags.
The manipulation you describe and that many of us experienced was terribly abusive. It trained me so well psychologically that I went right from the party (where I’d spent my entire adult life up to then) into an emotionally abusive marriage. It felt pretty similar, and normal.
I had no idea who I was. I didn’t even know how to experience emotions any more.
I’m free of both now and ready to rejoin the struggle on better terms. Never again will I surrender my better judgment to the demands of others.
Dave said
Carl, to dismiss others’ thinking as “ideological” while your own thinking is “anti-ideological” is nothing more than an ideological conceit. If you keep this sort of thing up, you’ll accumulate bad karma and come back to life as a Republican.
Carl Davidson said
Thanks, Dave, for the warning against conceit. It started my day with a chuckle and has a grain of truth. But Zen is anti-ideological, not me. My head is as full of a potpourri of stuff as anyone’s. But I do work at using science and openness to the new to combat the ‘ideological’ stuff day in and day out.
Doloras LaPicho said
I find Carl’s musings interesting because I’ve also been on a project for some time to drawl the parallels between non-dualist spirituality and revolutionary socialism. Perhaps we should get some dialogue going.