Kasama

Nina Simone: I will never be your clown or wear a painted smile

Polemics

Torn

The following is a selection of the posts and discussions that have appeared here on Kasama in the last nine months. More to come…

Discussion of the RCP’s Cultural Revolution

Polemics over the RCP & forging new revolutionary trend

On Religion

3 Responses to “Polemics”

  1. Qurbani said

    September 19, 2009 at 12:54 am

    Mike,I just wished to confirm that your views on a Socialist Multi-party System?Does Bob Avakian formulate the view of a Socialist multi-party State?I really wanted to confirm the viewpoints.Do you not feels that such aset up would oppose Leninism or Maoist Ideology?Do you have any assesment of the R.I.M?

  2. zerohour said

    September 20, 2009 at 3:29 pm

    I’ll let Mike answer for himself, but I wanted to make a point here.

    There has been a tendency among communists to take historical experiences and turn them into an ossified models.

    Up to September 1917, Lenin was still open to a socialist coalition government. When it became clear that no arrangement could be agreed upon with necessary urgency, the Bolsheviks took the lead in the revolutionary overthrow. The ensuing process of state formation was not pre-planned. As for the Chinese Revolution, the Communist Party initiated an early alliance with the Kuomintang when it was still headed by the greatly respected Sun Yat-sen. He died in 1925. I’m not sure if the CPC had a definite view of a future revolutionary polity at that point, but in power struggle within the Nationalist Party the reactionary clique around Chiang Kai-shek won out, no other political organization emerged with any significant mass support by 1949 making a multi-party system a non-issue. My point is that these practices were practical solutions to concrete problems, not just something that simply arose from ideologies.

    In Nepal, the UCPN[M] are proceeding from a critical reading of the historical experience of communism to help inform their practice. In the process they have stated the obvious: a one-party state is no guarantee against capitalist restoration, and places serious restrictions on the political development of the masses as it has been practiced. They have opened up the question of revolutionary power and mass participation to a necessary re-thinking. Lenin once argued for a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.” What could be more anti-Leninist than to pose an abstract form as a concrete solution?

    As for Avakian’s or RCP’s views, they do not support the notion of a multi-party socialist state and have criticized the UCPN[M] for it. This pamphlet collects their polemics on this. For a more, I’d advise you to go to RCP’s site and see for yourself

  3. Mike E said

    September 20, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    Qurbani writes:

    “Mike,I just wished to confirm that your views on a Socialist Multi-party System?Does Bob Avakian formulate the view of a Socialist multi-party State?I really wanted to confirm the viewpoints.Do you not feels that such aset up would oppose Leninism or Maoist Ideology?Do you have any assesment of the R.I.M?”

    I wrote a piece on this called Socialist Democracy, Snowflakes & the Restoration of Capitalism which takes up this issue.

    Among other thins it says:

    “….in some ways, I think that the one-party state emerged from the particular conditions of that Russian revolution…. conditions that also framed the decline of forward revolutionary energies, and produced conditions in which capitalism was restored (without visible resistance within the party or the population)….

    And looking at that process, first Mao and now we have understood that somehow — through various decisions, preparations, modifications, changes in our forms of organization and work etc. — we need to develop a revolutionary polarization in which far broader sections of the population can be engaged (actively and over time) in the process of socialist transformation. And the polarization of a revolution has deep roots in the pre-revolutionary developments. (Example: the initial decision of the early social democrats in Russia to focus almost exclusively on urban workers, had long range implications for their lack of later post-revolutionary roots among rural and peasant people).

    With that in mind, the Nepali Maoists have chosen to alternate military and political offensives — and give time and attention ( before the seizure of power) to broadening the base of the revolution. I think they believe if they seize power with too narrow a base, they will effectively be forced to continue to rule by pointing the gun at large sections of the population — with all the implications that has for the revolutionary process.

    We have had two major socialist revolutions (Russia and China), and a number of smaller attempts at power (Vietnam, Cuba, etc). And, in ways that seem rather obviously mechanical, some communists say there are two models for revolution (i.e. a Soviet-style October Road, and a Chinese-style protracted peoples war). However I suspect that each future socialist revolution will be startlingly different (in its forms of approaching power, and perhaps in its forms of wielding new state power) — and so, while learning from the October Revolution and the Chinese revolution, I don’t think we should universalize their paths, or their forms of state power.

    (Look at the diversity of capitalist rule: constitutional monarchies, fascism, military juntas, presidential democracies, parliamentary democracies, religious theocracies, racial apartheid, revisionist-style state capitalism and more….. Why would we assume that socialist societies won’t have its own remarkable diversity of forms, reflecting both some inherent dynamics of socialist transition but also very particular histories and conditions producing various revolutions?)”

    more to come

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