Bill Martin On Conception & Collectivity: Pt. 2 Burnout, Old Tunes, and Need for the New
Posted by Mike E on October 16, 2008
This is the second installment of “Kasama Post #2″ by Bill Martin.
In September Kasama published Bill’s Going forward from here (Kasama Post #1), describing his break with the RCP. The essay generated great interest and lively commentary. Now, Bill offers his responses to that discussion.
Because of its length and richness, we will be dividing Bill’s “Kasama Post #2″ into five parts — and are publishing one part a day. subheads were inserted by Kasama. We recently post Part 1 At the Fork in the Road. This is Part 2.
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“…we actually need to go even further than Lenin’s ‘without revolutionary theory there won’t be a revolutionary movement.’ It is deep in humanity that we are the kinds of creatures who need both theory and revolution—and we need art, culture, philosophy, and ‘interesting discussions’ too. They aren’t just optional add-ons. To say the opposite is a kind of economism, perhaps definitive of economism.”
“we need political line, but we need something like a conception of ‘line without linearity,’ and a line that also encounters the critique of the idea of the line, as seen for instance in Derrida and Deleuze.”
“There’s another layer of burnout, when the recent RCP Manifesto basically says that BA has been the chair of a party that has been mostly composed of revisionists for most of its history. That is astounding, really, that the “Cultural Revolution” in the RCP is based on the idea that for more than thirty years the party has been mostly revisionist, most of the time. And now to take recourse to the idea that ‘the party, no matter how small, can lead a revolution, if the line is correct’ is also an astounding admission of defeat, after all this time. It’s one thing to say that at the beginning of party formation; after thirty-three years it is something like a mere abstraction. Better of course neither to burn out nor fade away, but clearly that means moving forward from here, toward really finding the new synthesis.”
“In some sense, the party was already closed down when that period of vibrancy and experience closed up, and maybe now it’s a little like those bands that tour every summer but with only one or two original members. It’s essentially a cover band that is still capable of doing a good rendition of the old tunes, but we can’t expect anything really new from it. We need a new song or a new symphony or concept-album, even, and the old band gave us some good bits, but when they patched those together and claimed to have the new masterwork, they blew it.”
“Taking responsibility for everything can be a way toward mere armchair philosophizing and effectively taking responsibility for nothing…. and [if] this unending responsibility is ‘singular,’ as it supposedly is in the case of Bob Avakian (no one else is doing what he does, no one else can do what he does), then there are numerous bad results. There is a denial of the collective nature of the communist project, and therefore it becomes difficult for new collectivities to emerge.”
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RE: Conception and Collectivity (Kasama post #2)
Response to comments to “Going forward from here”
Part 2: Burnout, Old Tunes, and Need for the New
By Bill Martin
Dealing with philosophical and theoretical issues is just one of many things that we need to do to build and sustain a new communist movement, and probably not the most important thing.
This is different from taking recourse to “well, philosophy isn’t for everybody, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea” (at the dinner party that is not a revolution).
But it is important, and it is a lot more important than what can be seen in the declaration of its importance in the talks that were given around the New Synthesis, where an allegiance is declared once again to the narrow canon of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, even while disavowing crucial aspects of their philosophical work, and with a very minimal and bogus nod toward Hegel, and then a proclamation of the real deal, that the unsurpassable horizon of our thought in this era is BA’s discovery that truth is correspondence to reality.
Maybe we don’t need “all this theory” or theorizing. Some of us get carried away with mere verbiage from time to time—I know I do.
(Then again, I remember reading the preface to BA’s memoir, where Lenny Wolf writes that Cornell West suggested that BA tell the story of his life, so once again they got out the tape recorder, and I thought, “here we go again.” Years ago, back in the 1980s sometime when I would periodically write letters to BA and others in the RCP, I suggested that Derrida might have something interesting to say about the logocentrism of tape-recorder theorizing—but whatever!)
However, we actually need to go even further than Lenin’s “without revolutionary theory there won’t be a revolutionary movement.” It is deep in humanity that we are the kinds of creatures who need both theory and revolution—and we need art, culture, philosophy, and “interesting discussions” too, they aren’t just optional add-ons.
To say the opposite is a kind of economism, perhaps definitive of economism.
We all wish things were a little more simple and straightforward, and it doesn’t hurt to point out those places where, in the midst of the complexity, something simple and straightforward also needs to be said. Maybe if things were really simple and straightforward we wouldn’t have had such a hard time having socialist revolutions and keeping them going. If things worked in as linear and mechanical way as some in the ICM have thought, even at times our most important leader-theorists, then we’d already be in a communist world by now. Except we wouldn’t, because humanity is not simple or straightforward or linear.
Reductivist dreams (nightmares, really, but it is not hard to see the very real situations and frustrations that lead to them) of a simplistic “revolution,” without all this “tiresome” philosophy (not that it isn’t tiresome sometimes, and I’m sure I’ve contributed to that at times, but it is also tiring, exhausting, and again in ways that people who don’t do this kind of work might not understand, especially if one is trying to coordinate this work with revolutionary politics), are in fact a cancellation of human possibility and the human project.
(A side note: we need political line, but we need something like a conception of “line without linearity,” and a line that also encounters the critique of the idea of the line, as seen for instance in Derrida and Deleuze. I think Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of chess and Go in A Thousand Plateaus is pretty interesting here, and of course the discussion of Go also brings in Mao and guerilla strategies.)
Repackaged Thoughts as New Masterpieces
Dealing with this stuff—flip and unthinking potshots against philosophy and intellectual work—burns a person out, and now there’s another layer of burnout, when the recent RCP Manifesto basically says that BA has been the chair of a party that has been mostly composed of revisionists for most of its history.
That is astounding, really, that the “Cultural Revolution” in the RCP is based on the idea that for more than thirty years the party has been mostly revisionist, most of the time. And now to take recourse to the idea that “the party, no matter how small, can lead a revolution, if the line is correct” is also an astounding admission of defeat, after all this time. It’s one thing to say that at the beginning of party formation; after thirty-three years it is something like a mere abstraction.
Better of course neither to burn out nor fade away, but clearly that means moving forward from here, toward really finding the new synthesis.
But for perhaps a brief period longer, another few weeks or even months, one of the things that needs to be done is to “remember the good times and the bad times.”
We still need to bring forward the “good times,” including the many contributions that Bob Avakian has made to understanding the experience of socialism and the possibilities of revolution. For my part, I think we need to bring forward that vibrancy that was opened up in the 2000-2006 period of the RCP (and perhaps even periodize the whole thing in a way that I, not being in the party, would be incapable of doing, though I keep hearing very interesting things), a very significant part of which was the change in the line on homosexuality. [url]
With 20/20 hindsight, perhaps that line change was the beginning of the opening that the RCP itself, or its Chair, began to fear. Again, there are others who can speak to this far better than I can, at least in terms of the dynamics inside the RCP (and I appreciate what John Steele said on this subject, regarding different lines in the party), but I think this “recoil” thesis—as always, carried out under the headings of urgency, security, and unique innovation (and not that there is not some truth under each of these headings)—bears further scrutiny.
(“2changetheworld” would be another interesting example.)
Looking for Where They Blew It
In some sense, the party was already closed down when that period of vibrancy and experience closed up, and maybe now it’s a little like those bands that tour every summer but with only one or two original members. It’s essentially a cover band that is still capable of doing a good rendition of the old tunes, but we can’t expect anything really new from it.
We need a new song or a new symphony or concept-album, even, and the old band gave us some good bits, but when they patched those together and claimed to have the new masterwork, they blew it.
This needs to be repeated, even if it perhaps just speaks to my own naiveté (so maybe I need to be reminded repeatedly that I have at times been very naïve): in the 2000-2006 period, I had great hope for the direction of the RCP and what it might mean for larger social transformation in the world, at least as someone looking on from outside of the party, and then they managed to blow it.
It might even be that they could not help but blow it, because they were up against both some of their own limitations and up against a world that is geared toward the prevention of the emergence of real events, a world where history is suppressed, even a world where humanity lacks a world (as Badiou puts it), and Bob Avakian did not find the way to transcend these limitations, or even to confront these limitations in a rigorous, systematic, scientific way.
Instead, in a sense, they reified and valorized the limitations (sometimes in very crude ways, such as going on about “epistemology,” as if no one else had ever pursued the subject, and just using the term “postmodernism”—as it is often used in academia, too—as a way of not having to actually read “the Derridas,” “the Foucaults,” etc.), and that’s where they blew it.
Some of the limitations they were up against are there in the world, and they needed to try to understand these; some of the limitations were internal to their own model, including a simple unwillingness to do some homework. As Mao said, “the important thing is to be good at learning.” Perhaps everything finally turned inward to the point where some qualitative line was finally crossed, propelling BA and what remains of the party into something very close to solipsism.
As I said in my response to my “kiss off”/security-warning letter, I take no pleasure in recognizing any of this, and neither do I think anyone should. It is a real loss, and we need to take account of it and how it happened in order to do better. We also need to take account of the real limitations we are also up against in any attempt to regroup into a new communist movement.
I’ve been thinking more about formulations of the “taking responsibility for everything” (e.g., the whole ICM) sort. On the one hand, from a Kantian and Sartrean standpoint, this formulation is appealing—obviously an irony for Bob Avakian and the RCP, given their efforts to negate Kant. On the other hand, this sort of approach (taking responsibility for the whole world) can be rendered vacuous, a mere “empty formalism.” (This last was Hegel’s charge against Kant’s ethical philosophy, which was taken up by Marx and Engels.) Taking responsibility for everything can be a way toward mere armchair philosophizing and effectively taking responsibility for nothing.
Furthermore, if this perspective is mixed in with the idea that this unending responsibility is “singular,” as it supposedly is in the case of Bob Avakian (no one else is doing what he does, no one else can do what he does), then there are numerous bad results.
There is a denial of the collective nature of the communist project, and therefore it becomes difficult for new collectivities to emerge.
It is hard to see, in this case, why there is a need for the party, and we have seen the results of this approach with the RCP, where it is less and less a party and more a study group based around Bob Avakian’s talks. I understand the point that the Bolsheviks weren’t really the Bolsheviks without Lenin, and the same dynamic for the Chinese Communists and Mao, but that is again where a leader-theoretician has to deliver the goods. Extraordinary claims for the singularity of a theoretical development and for the singular role of a certain leader have to backed up. Without that, and without the party, even Lenin and Mao are just theoreticians, and then we have to look at their work according to certain standards.
Another way to put it is that, in my distinction between Revolutionary Movement Theory and Philosophical Marxism, the former is not going to stand up that well without an actual movement that is feeding into the theory and that is able to take up the theory and make it a material force. This never happens all at once or in one single, smooth motion, but if it isn’t really happening at all, what is left at the end of the day are some theoretical fragments that may be very insightful but that don’t form a “new synthesis.”
I did beseech the LPM over the last several years to try to pull together some of the intellectuals in the party, who are at times capable of doing very advanced intellectual work that meets high standards, to themselves write the kind of book that would make Bob Avakian’s many important insights into a coherent, rigorously- and systematically-developed whole, a whole that is connected to broad developments in the areas that were important to Marx and Engels: political economy, philosophy, and history.
Why there was such resistance to this idea, basically a book on the social theory of Bob Avakian, is worth investigating, and I would guess that whichever aspects of this are connected to internal developments (or devolutions) in the RCP are also, at deeper levels, connected to line questions—most fundamentally the line question of the singularity of the chair.
The result again is bad: on the one side, a lack of trust and building collectivity, which also seems to have resulted in simple mean-spiritedness; on the other side, this singularity undergirds and interpenetrates with the sense that BA can only rely on himself for work in theory, and therefore he only reads his own work and continuously quotes himself.
To pursue this singular form of theoretical work ends in the solipsism that has been very nearly accomplished at this stage. It is a special kind of valorization of a philosophical monism, the monism of a single mind that is somehow capable of taking responsibility for the whole world. A better Kantian formulation would be that we should all try to take responsibility for the whole world, and that part of our striving is a recognition that this struggle must be waged on a number of fronts, and that sometimes certain people play special roles in this struggle and should be supported in their work.
Again, I tried to develop this argument in a way at least congenial to Marxism and historical materialism in Ethical Marxism, and no doubt from the (strangely existentialist) singular-minded monist perspective I am engaging in the terrible sin of “eclecticism.” In fact I do think a good argument can be made for philosophical pluralism (an argument I make, for instance, when confronted by the divide in the institutions of Western philosophy between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, which then also excludes many other schools of thought that have interesting contributions to make) and for what I call a “team concept” in Marxist theorizing. Of course I also think we should continually aim for a synthesis (that’s what Kant said too—all thought aims toward a system), and that we should do this “in accord” with the general aim of understanding the world in order to change it. Especially in response to the forced declaration of a premature, singular monism, however, I think we’d better risk some “eclecticism” and even what will undoubtedly be condemned as “agnosticism.”
Of course it is ridiculous to have the very few people who are engaging with Bob Avakian’s work dismissed as “parasitic critics.” But this is coming from a solipsism in which only one person is authorized to think. As others have said here (at the Kasama site), why wouldn’t this lead to a moronization of the party? Why wouldn’t this lead to “whateverism“?
Eddy said
Here, I think, is where the discussion usually veers off off the road.
Lenin and his cohort are as much a product of their differences as of their unity. When we start to disengage consciousness from social being is where fallacies like ‘leader of a special type’ gains traction. For the RCP as it stands now, correct ideas do not proceed from social practice, because to admit that denies the ‘specialness’ of the one true thinker.
Is it even possible to consider Mao’s contributions to Marxism in the absence of the Party he struggled alongside and learned from? (Mao answered this one for us: no.)
The fallacy that thinking can be considered in isolation from being (to say nothing of which dialectical relationships), and as importantly, that being is absolutely and fundamentally social, keeps raising its subjective idealist head when we talk about ‘working with ideas’ or ‘theorizing’ as self-contained acts or phenomenon.
mike ely said
Eddy writes:
Eddy: break down why you think that.
For example: There are many examples where correct ideas arise from social practice but ALSO arrive to us through the quite special work and capabilities of one thinker.
When I left the RCP, one of the things I did was go and study scientific breakthroughs, because they involve these questions of practice and keyh thinkers that were at the heart of our line struggles in the RCP.
I studied the book by Eldridge on Darwin’s notebooks — which examine HOW Darwin came up with his remarkable idea (natural selection driving evolution, etc.)
And it is clear that there was massive social practice (and resultant data), and all kinds of initial thinking floating around in the air (Darwin’s grandfather believed in evolution).
But Darwin did something remarkable — he actually synthesized something new and different, and he did it in a profoundly scientific and creative way that was truly special (and worth learning from).
It’s not like correct ideas ooze out of social practice without the intermediary of individual brains who formulate those correct ideas. Or (to put it another way) there are many many ways that social practice constantly gives rise to incorrect ideas.
(I wrote a piece to get into this: http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/understanding-the-material-basis-of-incorrect-ideas/)
I agree with your point:
The development of correct ideas is profoundly collective in the sense you mean — both in the sense that the social practice is collectively generated, and also because the ideas we are grappling with are collectively generated. We all stand on the shoulders of others (Darwin included, obviously).
And I agree with Bill’s point that ” There is a denial of the collective nature of the communist project, and therefore it becomes difficult for new collectivities to emerge.”
But i still think (from my own experience, including my experience with Avakian which I have discussed very little) that there is something important that happens when someone synthesizes ideas — especially if they get to the heart of something important (in a way that profoundly capture something true about reality in a new way).
[If I don't reply to your next comments right away, it is because i'm traveling]
mike ely said
one more thing:
I was surprised by Eldridge’s insight that Darwin’s insight was not mainly deduced from the mass of data. He talks about the difference between deductive thinking and inductive thinking.
In many ways, Darwin had a series of intense experiences that gave him a flash of insight, which he formulated as a bold (and fragile) hypothesis.
And the work was taking that large audacious theory — and THEN examining the mass of data in that light. (Darwin spent years in a very details study of diversity barnacles — after secretly formulating his core theories — to test, vet, and refine his understanding into a relatively “correct idea.”)
Again, correct ideas don’t simple ooze out of the mass of data as some inescapable conclusion that the facts “point to.” On the contrary: facts don’t “speak for themselves.” They are often incomprehensivle until a major leap (a rupture and intuitive leap of great creative force) renders them comprehensible — and then the data and social practice emerges as a way of verifying and critically evaluating “the correct idea.” (I.e as Mao says, you take your theory back into practice to deepen it and critically evaluate it.)
The complexity of this real-world process has (in the real history of thought) major leaps that were possible by “special” theorists.
Our critique (or at least my critique) of the Chen Boda’s theory of genius (and Avakian’s self-theory of a man of special caliber) is not rooted in a denial that there are (in fact) geniuses, and people who step forward in special conjunctural moments and are able to rework how all of us think about our world.
[Mao's fight with the genius theory of Chen Boda and Lin Biao did not rest on any assertion that there were no geniuses -- he did not deny there were geniuses. And I believe that Mao himself was remarkable in ways that demand to be recognized, if we are going to be objective and scientific.
http://mikeely.wordpress.com/letter-8/.
Mao's critique of the genius theory rested on how people like Chen and Lin described the work that key thinkers perform, and their view of its place in society and the larger collective process.]
Keith said
I think Bill Martin’s comments reveal the shallowness of the critique of the RCP and Avakianism. Instead of going to the root of the problem we are told a story of a few wrong turns(for instance, instead of seeing that the whole idea of a theoretical “synthesis” is the basis of Avakianism, and it is wrong root and branch we get a longing for the “real synthesis”).
There is even a lament that Avakain’s “social thought” wasn’t systematically elaborated by the intellectuals in the RCP! Instead of relief that he was not involved in such a colossal waste of time during an unfortunate period of his life when he was deluded into thinking the RCP was something other than what is was — a little sect with no impact on working people in the US.
Instead of the recognition that the personality cult is just the logical conclusion of trends that begin much earlier (trends present at the founding moment, when a sect declares itself the vanguard) and are manifested in the radical separation of theory practice, the party from the masses that are at the heart of all the errors, which results in the absurd and tragic-comic claim that a “leader” with no practical accomplishments is a man of the same caliber as Lenin and Mao. If I were not a man of the left I would just laugh. Instead, I have to shudder too.
Bill Martin’s piece is similar to other trends on this site who seem to think that the RCP’s errors were relatively minor, and that the real problem was that the chair of the party fell off his stool one too many times and became a megalomaniac. This the significance of the recurring idea that the personality cult is the result of an internal coup, instead of the recognition the cult is the logical conclusion of tendencies present at the founding of the party.
Eddy said
Mike wrote:
NB: I am not intending to be flip or pedantic here, so I apologize now for anything below that smacks of either. Not my intention.
I fully agree that ideas do not ‘ooze’ out of social practice, and I also agree that incorrect ideas are also produced by social practice.
A good, sufficiently remote in time, example of an incorrect summation derived from ‘reality’ would be worshipping the sun as a deity. As we now know the sun is not a deity, but the development of sun worship accompanied the development of agriculture. The perceptual understanding of seasonality, climate cycles, water cycles, etc. enabled the hypothesis.
Nor do ‘ideas’ ooze. Thinking and being form a dialectical relationship. Many writers have discussed this one, but in my formulation, the relationship between perception and reflection is not simply or solely quantitative. Leaps in our understanding derive from prior experiences.
I do not deny that contemplative moments enable us to ‘collect our thoughts’. The social contribution to that collection may be at issue, however.
Where we may also disagree is on the agency of brains. (see NB above)
A brain is only one organ within a complex organism. Without a central nervous system, an endocrine system, and various other organs (lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines), and especially muscles, bones, skin, cartilage, a brain is just another lump of rotting meat.
The physiology of the brain requires many of the other internal organs simply to maintain structure and replace dying cells.
Most fetuses develop a brain early in the gestation process. But human cognition does not begin to develop al all until after we are born. It takes many months (typically by the end of the first year) for human cognition to get to the point of comprehending others as intentional agents, and then to comprehend the possibility of shared intentionality.
This rudimentary cognitive development is a social process. It presupposes sense perception, it is facilitated greatly by sight, hearing and the ability to manipulate (all of which are undoubtedly physiological and not social), but those abilities remain rudimentary outside a social situation. (An infant abandoned on a desert island will never approach ‘humanness’ in any meaningful sense of the word. It will not develop the shared intentionality mentioned above, it will not develop language, it will not develop reflective thought. All of those faculties are socially derived.)
So while quite obviously individuals think, and these (here) thoughts came from me and not from you, they are still results of complex social matrices, in specific social circumstances; for example, 55 years in a highly stratified, capitalist society.
And importantly, I write in response to your arguments and thoughts.
(I have much more to say on this, as well as on Darwin and N.E., but I willl stop here for now.)
mike ely said
You seem to be saying that our “own thoughts” are both our own (in the sense that they emerge and reside in a single brain) and they are collective (in that they arise on a social context, are tested there, are build out of the ideas and experiences of others.)
on that we agree.
Eddy said
Mike wrote:
I will stress not simply a ‘context’ but through social practices. In other words, thinking moves from the group to the individual and back again. The group is not simply a backdrop.
glo_ball said
Bill’s assertion that Avakian only reads his own work and only relies on himself and his own writings for his theory is just flat out wrong. There are so many examples I can use to disprove this, just read any of Avakain’s writings (or “transcribed talks”, oh, the horror!), including all of his most recent and foundational ones. In “Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity”, BA engages and “relies on” Skybreaks’s work in “Science of Evolution”, in Part 1. Here’s a quote from this same transcribed talk “Along with breaking with all expressions of religious tendencies, within the communist movement itself as well as more generally, there is a need to leap beyond and rupture with a definite legacy of the communist movement in terms of tendencies (which still exist and exert a significant influence) toward pragmatism and empiricism, reification of the proletariat, and reification of socialism, as though this is some sort of religious-tending process, some teleological process that’s all working out toward some predetermined end (what Bill Martin refers to as “inevitable-ism”).” You’ve just lost an important underpinning of your so-called critique of Avakain, Bill. Another quote from the “Epistemology” essay: “Yes we don’t want people in ivory towers, but Bill Martin’s point on this [that intellectuals do need the setting in which to do their work]— we have to solve that contradiction. We have to put this problem to the masses.” I could continue on with quotes from both the “Epistemology” essay and “Making and Emancipating”, which are full of examples where BA is engaging in and learning from the works of other intellectuals, using a scientific Marxist methodology, but maybe, Bill, you should “do your homework” and take a look back over these pieces of work before you make baseless critiques.
RW Harvey said
Greetings:
Perhaps one problem is reliance on one leader to come up with all the answers/theories to the exclusion of others, or the collective. As part of this is the inability to critique and develop “the leader’s” contributions, after all, Darwin has been critiqued, modified and advanced; one question is can this process take place when the visionary leader is still alive and within the ferment of revolutinary practice? Perhaps this leads back to the whole discussion of democracy and centralism…
P.S. I think it is a commplete misreading of the human brain to say that thoughts arise that are “our own” — all thought, all feeling are inextricably embedded in a social, relational matrix from womb to tomb.
Zack said
“In other words, thinking moves from the group to the individual and back again. The group is not simply a backdrop.”
That leads me to this:
What is a group but a collection of individuals?