Excerpts: 9 Letters
Nine Letters to Our Comrades:
Getting beyond Avakian’s new synthesis
By Mike Ely,
December 2007
[The full 9 letters at Kasama website: mikeely.wordpress.com]
How do we make revolution in a world that seems to conspire against liberation?
With apparent singlemindedness, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) has been insisting that its leader, Bob Avakian, has the answers for humanity. His new theoretical synthesis (this party says) is a major rupture with, and leap beyond, even the best of previous communism, including Marx, Lenin and Mao. And (this party says) this New Synthesis represents the best and even only hope for the future.
The “Nine Letters” unfold a detailed Maoist critique of Avakian’s synthesis. It engages and criticizes Avakian’s claims and methods. The main author is Mike Ely, a former editor of the RCP’s Revolution newspaper.
These “Nine Letters” excavate the RCP’s inability to establish any mass base or revolutionary movement over more than thirty-five years. They dissect the RCP’s escalating cult of personality around Avakian – with special focus on the cult’s theoretical assumptions, denial of practice, and implications for revolutionary strategy.
In a beginning way, these Nine Letters point to a different road for communists and call on others to join in a very presumptuous work of re-conception and new revolutionary practice.
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Short excerpts from each of the Nine Letters:
Letter 1: A Time to Speak Clearly
Revolutionary communism is dividing into two around us. There is sharp struggle over how to make the breakthroughs we need in both communist theory and revolutionary practice. The RCP has proven to be one of the disappointments of this moment.
There has been a devastating contrast between Avakian’s talk of critical scientific thinking and the crudely un-critical thinking that surrounds this party’s escalating cult of personality.
The militant and heart-felt internationalism so closely associated with the RCP is being deeply compromised. For the last year, the living revolution of Nepal has been treated with a long sour public silence by the RCP.
Letter 2: A Gaping Hole Instead of Partisan Bases
A painful place to start: The RCP has not developed, ever, a mass partisan political base for revolutionary communist politics anywhere, among any section of the people. Any synthesis that does not solve or even acknowledge these basic problems has a gaping hole at its very core.
We need to excavate our shortcomings and listen to the criticism of others. But we will do so because the people of the world need a radically re-conceived communist project. We must emulate Lenin’s hunger to win and his focus on grabbing the chance within the maelstrom.
Letter 3: Forays, Wrong Turns and Blaming the People
Problems of dogmatism, self-isolation and political fantasy — that have always plagued the RCP — are now in command to a new degree. The heart of this is how the RCP’s central leader, Bob Avakian, is seen and promoted.
In place of the mass line, there is a one-sided stress on telling — in patronizing ways. The fetish of the word morphs into the fetish of the leader and tries to “vault over” the complicated processes by which people really decide what to think and how to act.
Leaders dream up grand schemes out of whole cloth — without forming alliances, constituencies or trained networks over time. They don’t have their own base to bring to the process. They “plan” to reach millions without actually organizing thousands. We should be suspicious of such contrivances and “get rich quick” schemes.
There is complicity and corruption within an imperialist superpower. But blaming, shaming and literally cursing the masses is wrong — both in principle and in this particular moment.
Seriously attempting what is needed will require something quite different from what we now have. We need a revolutionary current that grows – as thousands of radical people go through a series of political processes together, under conditions where creative communist politics can seriously contend and transform.
Letter 4: Truth, Practice and a Confession of Poverty
Step into a room full of geologists or working philosophers, and announce “Our leader Bob Avakian has made a major epistemological break. He says we have to go for the truth, rather than hiding things.” Would anyone be impressed?
The issue facing our movement is not so much “are we for truth?” The issue is much more “what is true and what isn’t?” With Avakian’s method and approach, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth are pancaked flat, producing a simplified set of ideological assertions, where the RCP can give lip service to critical thinking and yet promote a logic of close-minded zealotry.
A persistent example of the denigration of practice is the marked dilettantism of Avakian’s analysis. Avakian is an innovative and provocative thinker, but his expositions are often brainstorms masquerading as science. For example, the RCP’s conclusion that there is a concerted rush toward fascist theocracy that is threatening a deep social schism (even perhaps literally “civil war”) between thinking people and theocrats within the U.S. Look at the fragmentary work which underlies that claim — not just underlying the public argumentation, but the analysis itself.
It is extremely important to grapple, theoretically and practically, with the problems of socialism and capitalist restoration. It is extremely important to correctly sum up the experiences of the 20th century and make those insights known broadly among the people. But there is an idealist air of classic utopian socialism about Avakian’s work on this: as if we can show people how to act now by fleshing out fully (from our current imaginings) details the future society must adopt.
Take the theoretical speculation made on the future transition to communism, and compare it to the glaring poverty of theoretical work that has been devoted to many other core problems of the specific revolution we need to take responsibility for: on the struggle to create a revolutionary base, on deindustrialization and the situation of African American people, on the entwining of the revolutionary processes across North America, and a dozen other ignored questions.
Letter 5: Particularities of Christians and Fascists
Avakian’s analyses of religion have a distant, schematic, and reductionist quality. These works show little interest in the specific social and historic roots of people’s religious faith — and why particular religions have such power among particular communities. There is little appreciation of the complexity, sophistication and diversity of what people actually believe. And quite frankly there is little respect for the people and little real understanding of why many believe — or why some don’t.
You can’t actually understand people and religious movements by relying so heavily on a close textual read of their holy scriptures. And a communist understanding of political fundamentalism can’t be developed by just reworking lots of secular-liberal exposés of theocratic political trends.
There are no gods who hear our muffled cries. No one should expect divine blessings or miracles. The meek will not inherit the earth. But you can’t challenge Christian morality by crudely equating it with venality — with Old Testament “horrors” or the ugliest “traditional values.” You also have to deal (in truly dialectical ways) with Jesus’ admonitions to “love your brother” and “turn the other cheek.” You have to deal with grace, redemption, forgiveness, reconciliation, charity and hope for blessings — in other words, you have to all-sidedly deal (critically!) with what actually attracts people to Christian teachings.
The current fascization of society may accelerate and there may well be sudden leaps if there is another 9/11 event. But is the current arc going towards a specifically theocratic form of fascism? Are the possibilities really so either/or? Aren’t many stages and outcomes possible? Have we no respect for the role of political accident and the real-world mediations of necessity?
The RCP’s theory and predictions about Christian fascism is one of those places where a necessary substratum of research, investigation and the summation of political practice is missing. You need to analyze their actual movements (inside and outside the ruling class), their history, sharp internal contradictions, and what they would actually have to knock down (not just ideologically, but institutionally, legally, structurally and politically). We also have to hear and debate, in its own right, the underlying theory of fascism.
Letter 6: The Theory Surrounding “A Leader of This Caliber”
The RCP has articulated specific verdicts: That human history is shaped by the emergence of special leaders who transform the times in which they live. That Avakian can now be recognized as a leader “of the caliber” of “a Lenin or a Mao” — i.e., that he is a “rare, unique, and irreplaceable leader” who makes world-historic leaps in both theory and practice possible. That this “appreciation” of Avakian is a “cardinal question” for communists in the U.S., and a decisive question facing the world movement. And that communism (and by extension the future of humanity) “hangs by a thread.” In not-fully-formulated ways, that “thread” is Avakian and whether he is correctly appreciated (in the larger sense of that word) among communists and the people of the world.
These theories need to be brought fully into view here and subjected to sharp criticism.
Letter 7: Whateverism in Evaluating Avakian
Before the core theses of Avakian’s synthesis were ever debated, understood or even elaborated (before any real discussion of “epistemological break” or “solid core with a lot of elasticity”) — it was formally asserted to the RCP that the “appreciation” of Avakian’s work has become a “cardinal question” – a dividing line between revolution and revisionism. This assertion of “Avakian as the cardinal question” is whateverism. It is a blank check signed in advance by the collectivity of party leadership. It violates any scientific approach to ideas.
Letter 8: On the Cult of Personality: Revisiting Chen Boda’s Ghost
Karl Marx, 1877: “Such is my aversion to all cult of personality that when I was plagued by repeated attempts to honor me publicly, coming from different countries at the time of the International, I never allowed any of them to break into the public sphere — nor did I ever reply to any of them, except with a snub here and there.”
What Avakian downplays is that there has been sharp struggle among communists over what kind of authority to give leaders, and over which world outlook should imbue the way leaders are viewed. You can promote revolutionary leadership and authority in ways that do not unleash critical thinking and initiative. You can promote awe and slavishness. You can unleash a cascade of elitism and disrespect that showers down through your own organization with far-reaching consequences.
We should not adopt any theories of a tiered humanity — with a formal insistence on the specialness of some people. Leaders and the defense of leaders are necessary for material reasons. But there is no material necessity to make cults around communist leaders. There are important reasons not to do so.
Letter 9: Traveling Light, Coming from Within
[I]f, owing to objective and subjective conditions, this party exists and carries on for 40 or 50 years like the CPUSA before it and never leads a revolution… why would it be so terrible if somebody got together and formed another party and tried to learn from the positive and negative and went ahead and tried to make revolution?”
Bob Avakian, 1982
The rush into the future does not hang by any single thread — but it does demand something of us. One way or another, something different has to raise its head. It is now left for revolutionary communists, both inside and outside the RCP, to re-conceive as we re-group.
* * * * * * *
[The full 9 letters at Kasama website: mikeely.wordpress.com]
John said
Mike, this is all sort of interesting, but I can only wonder: you were able only in December of 2007 to draw these conclusions? Given this track record, do you really expect people to place faith in your political judgment? I’d suggest you consider offering a thought or two as to just what took you so long to acknowledge what has been painfully obvious for several decades running now. The problems with the RCP — its distended cult of personality, calcified thought processes & sclerotic organizational life — are hardly news to most people.
Matt said
Pretty much what John said. Did anyone ever really expect a New Left movement to connect with the working class, or frankly to even make attempts at doing so? Then again, I guess that’s why the New Left chose Mao as it’s role model! No need for organizing the working class, just make vague appeals to the “masses”.
mike ely said
Matt:
Connecting with the working class was a driving obsession of thousands of new leftists who became communists.
Perhaps you are unaware of this history — in which young communists left campuses and entered factories and industries across the U.S.
All through the 1970s there was a protracted experience with this. (I myself worked as a coal miner and as a communist activist in the struggles of the coalfields in that period).
And, also in contrast to your assumption above) this rather remarkable and rather diverse experiment of both “organizing the working class” and bringing revolutionary consciousness “home” to the working class — was done under the banner of Mao (who himself went to the working class in his youth and organized the coal miners of Anyuan — here is the rather famous portrait of the young Mao traveling to join and lead those coal miners).
In particular the following statement by mao was a defining one for a whole generation of communists:
“How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a nonrevolutionary or a counter-revolutionary. If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a nonrevolutionary or a counter revolutionary.”
Perhaps it would be worthwhile at some point to revisit that history — especially if you have been given impressions that are so wide of the mark.
TellNoLies said
That quote from Mao finds significant (if somewhat less strident) echoes in Gramsci’s thoughts on the party and the formation of organic intellectuals.
Green/Red Rev said
Matter is not only the working class. Not every revolution should be only looking upon the working class. Working class of the US has its imperlialistic featurs as well. For example when in Los Angeles the MTA Buse drivers went on strike – we are talking about American working class with around 20 bucks per hour, union and all that, tens, maybe hundreds of thousadns of the poor, immigrant, part timers were left in trouble. The rich of course had their cars but… To make it simple i ought to say that Revolution is not only a working class per se matter. Many humanists, environmentalists, up to animal rights people should understand that their ambitious are not attainable within the status quo. You have heard the story of Wheat Bread? There was a time that only the poor and slave got the wheat bread and the rich racist weirdos wanted bread white too. They used acid and destroyed the most productive elements of the bread to make it white. Then, years later, after discovering that their breads are empty from benefit, they started to fill it with vitamins and this and that. at least some factories started giving real wheat bread without any acid used. BUT THE WHEAT BREAD IS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN WHITE BREAD. why? shouldn’t it be in fact cheaper since less things are done to the flour? No. Big factories, corporations still exist. Until the wrong factory is not broken and turned down in revolutionary style, until a new state does not break the beef factory propagandas etc., hiding the both negative effects of meet and of course manur’s pollutant nature, etc., Mc Vegen and Wheat Bread will be more expensive than double cheeseburger and white bread. what’s the sence of burning this or that lab or factory to defend the lives of animals or burning few SUVs to stop pollution? comrades. friends, adventurism feeds our egos, but don’t solve the problems.
I believe that in every capitalist countries, even imperialists, revolution’s objective conditions exist. it is the subjective aspect, how to lead and what to lead whom for, that matters. And classical socialism is the 19th century theory. Marx was asked when communism comes over, since the contradiction of labor and capital is vanished then there’ll be no dynamic of movement, since without contradiction things don’t move. He answered contradiction of man vs nature. Well, it is already here. Instead of paying 20 bukcs per month to Greenpeace for its shows and small achievemnts come and join the Kasama, form a new revolutionary force that thinks beyond trade unions.
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