Part I: “Humanity Needs Revolution and Communism”



160 years ago, Marx and Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world—the international proletariat—had nothing to lose but their chains and had a world to win. That manifesto put forward the basics of the pathbreaking theory that would guide that struggle.

25 years later, the first, brief attempt at proletarian revolution occurred with the Paris Commune; and nearly 50 years after that, the first real breakthrough—the first real consolidated socialist revolution—was made in the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Lenin and, after Lenin’s death, Stalin. This was followed in China—where the revolution came to power in 1949 and where 17 years later the leader of that revolution, Mao Tsetung, launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a revolution within the revolution to both prevent China from reverting to capitalism and to actually take it further toward communism.

This whole first stage of the communist revolution came to an end in 1976. When Mao died, there was a counter-revolutionary coup in China that imprisoned and/or executed those who had stood with him in leading the Cultural Revolution. The policies that they had fought so hard against were put into effect, and capitalism was restored. Today there are no genuine socialist countries in the world. And people all over the world feel, and struggle with, that weight every day—whether they know it or not.

So, how to go forward in the face of that? How to embark on a new stage of revolution? In this situation, Bob Avakian has led in defending, upholding and building on the monumental achievements of those revolutions and the illuminating insights of its greatest thinkers and leaders. But he has also deeply analyzed the mistakes, and the shortcomings in conception and method that led to those mistakes. And on that basis, he’s forged a coherent, comprehensive and overarching theoretical framework—that is, a synthesis. While this definitely comes out of and builds on what has gone before, this advance has also involved real ruptures with the past understanding and experience as a crucial element, which is why we call it the new synthesis.

http://www.rwor.org/a/129/New_Synthesis_Speech-en.html

Embarking on a New Stage of Revolution

160 years ago, Marx and Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world—the international proletariat—had nothing to lose but their chains and had a world to win. That manifesto put forward the basics of the pathbreaking theory that would guide that struggle.

25 years later, the first, brief attempt at proletarian revolution occurred with the Paris Commune; and nearly 50 years after that, the first real breakthrough—the first real consolidated socialist revolution—was made in the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Lenin and, after Lenin’s death, Stalin. This was followed in China—where the revolution came to power in 1949 and where 17 years later the leader of that revolution, Mao Tsetung, launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a revolution within the revolution to both prevent China from reverting to capitalism and to actually take it further toward communism.

This whole first stage of the communist revolution came to an end in 1976. When Mao died, there was a counter-revolutionary coup in China that imprisoned and/or executed those who had stood with him in leading the Cultural Revolution. The policies that they had fought so hard against were put into effect, and capitalism was restored. Today there are no genuine socialist countries in the world. And people all over the world feel, and struggle with, that weight every day—whether they know it or not.

So, how to go forward in the face of that? How to embark on a new stage of revolution? In this situation, Bob Avakian has led in defending, upholding and building on the monumental achievements of those revolutions and the illuminating insights of its greatest thinkers and leaders. But he has also deeply analyzed the mistakes, and the shortcomings in conception and method that led to those mistakes. And on that basis, he’s forged a coherent, comprehensive and overarching theoretical framework—that is, a synthesis. While this definitely comes out of and builds on what has gone before, this advance has also involved real ruptures with the past understanding and experience as a crucial element, which is why we call it the new synthesis.

Part II: A Philosophy to Understand—and Change—The World

Overcoming Limitations

It is hard to overstate the importance of this discovery and of Marx’s contributions generally to human thought—and human emancipation. He, along with Engels, set the theoretical foundation—they lit the way.

But there were, not surprisingly, limitations in the way that Marx and Engels went at this, and these problems got compounded by serious methodological shortcomings on the part of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union and the international communist movement for nearly 30 years following Lenin’s death. What’s worse, these errors came at the very time an advance in understanding was urgently called for. Mao—the leader of the Chinese Revolution—fought against some of these problems, but Mao himself was straining against an inherited framework and was not free from its influences. And these shortcomings had consequences.

Now, Bob Avakian has identified and deeply criticized weaknesses along four different dimensions of communist philosophy. These concern: one, a fuller break with idealist, even quasi-religious, forms of thought that had found their way into the foundation of Marxism and had not been ruptured with; two, a further and qualitatively deeper grasp of the ways in which matter and consciousness mutually interpenetrate with and transform each other; three, a critique of a host of problems associated with pragmatism and related philosophical tendencies; and four, a radically different epistemology, or way of getting at the truth. In doing all this, he has put Marxism on a more fully scientific basis.

To begin with, Avakian has excavated, criticized, and broken with certain secondary but still significant religious-type tendencies that have previously existed within the communist movement and communist theory—tendencies to see the achievement of communism as an "historical inevitability" and the related view of communism as almost like a heaven, some kind of "kingdom of great harmony," without contradictions and struggles among people.

But communism is not inevitable. There is no "god-like" History with a “Capital H” pushing things to communism. And while communism will bring about an end to antagonistic and violent conflicts among human beings, it will still be marked by contradictions, debates, and struggles—which will be carried out without violent conflict, and which will in fact be a very good thing, since this will continually contribute to the achievement of further understanding and further advances in transforming reality in accordance with the overall interests of humanity.

The view that the triumph of communism is "inevitable" and driven forward by History (with a "Capital H") and the tendency to see communism as some kind of utopia, without contradiction and struggle, was rather pronounced in Stalin, but has existed in Marxism to some degree more generally. In some significant aspects and to a significant degree, Mao broke with these kinds of views and methods; but the point is that there was still, even in Mao, an aspect of "inevitablism" and related tendencies, and Avakian has carried further the rupture with these ways of thinking, which are suggestive of an element of religiosity within Marxism, even while that element has never been principal or defining in terms of Marxist theory itself. In this regard (as well as in an overall sense) Avakian has not only upheld Mao and synthesized Mao's contributions to revolution and communist theory, but he has carried forward the rupture that Mao represented from Stalin, and on that basis Avakian has now made some ruptures with some of Mao's understanding too.

To say that communism is not inevitable is NOT to say that history is just a jumble. Indeed, there IS a coherence to history, as Marx put it, based on the fact that the productive forces (again, the land, technology, resources and people with their knowledge) are handed down from one generation to another and are constantly developing; and that when the relations that people enter into to carry out production become a fetter on the further development of those forces, big change ensues. Southern slave relations, which for decades coexisted with and fed northern capitalism, eventually became a fetter on the expansion of northern capitalism—and you got a civil war.

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Rupturing with Pragmatic Tendencies

Third, there have been other negative philosophical tendencies and problems in method, many of which relate to pragmatism—a philosophy, as I said earlier, that opposes the investigation of the deeper underlying reality in the name of “what works” and which also will maintain that ideas are true insofar as they are useful. This latter point begs the question of “useful for what?” and, more important, actually denies the real criterion of truth—whether an idea corresponds to reality. The idea that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was useful to Bush—but that didn’t make it true.

These erroneous philosophical tendencies, particularly with Stalin, infected and even permeated the communist movement. Here I will ask you to bear with me as I try to explain—because remember, these had serious consequences. They included instrumentalism, which refers to the use of theory more as an instrument to justify some short-term goal than as a means to dig for the truth; empiricism, in which the evaluation of truth is based on direct and immediately observable experience, in a narrow framework; apriorism, which means imposing categories on the world, rather than drawing these concepts from the world itself, in a complex interplay between practice and theory; and positivism, a method which tends to limit and confine science to the description and codifying of observations, focusing on criteria of quantitative measurement and prediction.

Part III: The New Synthesis: Political Implications—The International Dimension

Based on all this, Avakian developed the principle that the class struggle in any particular country was more determined on the international plane than by the unfolding of contradictions within a given country somehow outside of, or divorced from, that context. The revolutionary situation that enabled Lenin to lead the Bolsheviks to seize power arose out of an international conjuncture of world war that radically affected the situation in Russia and enabled a breakthrough to be made; Lenin’s internationalism and his qualitatively deeper grasp of materialism and dialectics enabled him to see this possibility when, initially at least, everyone else in the leadership opposed the idea of going for revolution. Similarly, the Chinese Revolution occurred in a specific international context of World War 2 and invasion from Japan.

Now you can pervert this to mean that you can’t do anything if the international “balance of forces is unfavorable.” That’s not true—and revolution, or even revolutionary attempts, within specific countries can radically affect that balance of forces. But you are playing in an international arena, and you have to understand the dynamics on that level; the “whole” of the imperialist system is greater than the sum of the separate nations that make up its individual parts.

So you can’t understand it from “my country out”—and doing it that way is another example of positivism, by the way. And you can’t see internationalism as something that you “extend” to other countries; the whole world has to be your point of departure. You have to come at revolution in “your” country as your share of the world revolution. Communists do NOT represent this or that nation; we’re (supposed to be) about eliminating all nations, even as we know we’re going to have to “work through” a world where there will be nations for a long time yet to come, even socialist nations, and where there will have to be a whole period of first achieving equality between nations in order to transcend them. But through that whole period, the communist movement has to keep its “eyes on the prize” of a world community of humanity, and relate everything it does to that.

Ironically, if you do come at it from “my country out” you will miss the real possibilities of revolution in the particular country in which you happen to be located. You won’t see how unexpected upheaval in this or that part of the world, or this or that aspect of the system, can afford openings that can be seized upon. You’ll be mentally landlocked, so to speak, in nationalism, and you won’t even see the basis to wage a successful struggle for national liberation. And that landlock has been part of what’s led to conservatism and, even worse, capitulation in what were times of great danger...but, yes, also times of great potential for revolutionary advance.

This whole wrong approach was consolidated in the context of a situation in which the Soviet Union came into being encircled by antagonistic imperialist powers attempting to strangle it, climaxing in the Nazi attack which took over 25 million Soviet lives. Defending the first socialist state was a real necessity. But this defense existed in contradiction with—in relation to—the necessity to advance revolution in other countries at the same time. In failing to recognize or denying the existence of this contradiction, the Soviet Union all too often sacrificed, or tried to sacrifice, the revolutionary struggle in these countries to its own defense. And this same blind spot persisted, frankly, in Mao. If you don’t recognize this as a contradiction, and if you don’t come from the foundational fact that imperialism has integrated the entire world into one and that the revolutionary process is an integrated, worldwide process—even as different countries have their own discrete, if inter-related, revolutions—you won’t have a chance of solving this.

Part IV: The New Synthesis: Political Implications—Dictatorship and Democracy

The new synthesis also has extremely important implications in regard to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx called the necessary transit point to a communist society. In short—how does the socialist state maintain itself as a power in transition to a world communist society without states—and not become an end in itself? How does it continue to advance—and not get turned back to capitalism?

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Upholding Achievements, Listening to Criticisms

One must also listen to and deeply examine the criticisms of that experience—from every quarter—and ask the question: at what cost? The proletarian state must hold on to power in the face of life-and-death resistance from the overthrown exploiters and vicious attack from without; but must that make it necessary to curtail and even chill and repress dissent, and ferment, and a diversity of ideas and approaches—including ideas and approaches oppositional to socialism? The new power faces a world-historic task in bringing the masses into intellectual life and the arts, and in forging a whole new culture, and amazing things were done in that regard in China in particular—but must that entail a restriction on the pursuits and inquiry and experimentation by people who were trained as artists and scientists in the old society, or even in the new? There is for the first time the basis—and a huge need—to approach the question of freedom as a positive and collective undertaking—“how we’re going to transform the world, and serve the people,” not “I want to get mine”; but must that mean that there is no need or little positive role for individuality, and individual space? There is a need to “get things done”—but how does that relate to the proletarian state as a radically different form of state, drawing the masses increasingly into the actual overall direction and direct administration of the state?

You can’t answer those questions for real if you are facile about it. Think for a minute about the Civil War in this country, and the period of Reconstruction, right after the slaves had been freed and were supposed to have been given land and political rights. Now for many years, the story that was told in the schools—and even more so, in the culture, with works like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation—was that Reconstruction was a terrible period in which white people underwent horrible suffering. (By the way, this should actually give you some perspective on the stuff you see on the socialist revolutions almost every week in the book review section of the New York Times.)

What actually happened is that in order to break the power of the southern planters, the northern capitalists at first deprived some of them of political rights for a while and militarily backed up the former slaves in attempting to vote, hold office, and claim land. But as these southern planters were reintegrated into the ruling class on a now subordinate basis, and as other contradictions in other parts of the U.S. began to boil up, the northern capitalists pulled out their troops and allowed their former enemies to organize the Ku Klux Klan, to institute slave-like systems of convict labor and sharecropping, and to deprive the Black masses of any rights at all—and to enforce this both through laws and through lynch mobs. This orgy of vengeance that overturned Reconstruction was officially labeled as “The Redemption.” And history was rewritten by the victors, until a new generation in the 1960s went back and unearthed the real, objective truth of the matter.

To have actually achieved the goals of Reconstruction would have required depriving the former slave-holders of political rights and enforcing that. Quite frankly, it would have been bloody, and some innocent people might have suffered...but it would have been worth it.

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Now let’s turn the page to the communist revolution, which is far more thoroughgoing, fundamental and radical than Reconstruction was ever intended to be and that came to power in far more difficult situations. These revolutions faced not only the overthrown exploiters—who, as Lenin once said, retain all their know-how and sense of entitlement and connections from before, and who come at you with ten times the viciousness and trickery once they lose their paradise—but also the militarily much more powerful imperialist powers. The Soviets fought a Civil War from 1918 to 1921 that cost millions of lives and basically destroyed what little industry they had, and they faced in that Civil War interference and invasions from 17 different military powers, including the U.S. And again, there was the Nazi invasion—not even 20 years after they won the Civil War.

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Let’s talk about the implications of that. To begin with, you cannot use instruments of capitalist dictatorship—the armies, prisons, courts, and bureaucracy which this system has developed and shaped to reinforce and extend exploitation and imperialism—you cannot use those very same things to abolish exploitation, uproot oppression, and defend against imperialists. And you cannot use the tools of bourgeois democracy that have been designed, first, to settle disputes among the exploiters and, second, to atomize, bamboozle, and render passive the masses of people, as a means to mobilize and unleash people to consciously understand and transform the whole world. While it is true, as Lenin put it, that socialism is a million times more democratic for the masses of people, socialism is not and cannot be an extension of bourgeois democracy (which is founded on exploitation) to the exploited. And that lesson is not only scientifically founded, it’s been paid for in blood.

The “4 Alls”

The proletarian dictatorship—and the proletarian system of democracy—has to be different. It has to serve the abolition of antagonistic divisions between people and the relations, institutions, and ideas that grow out of and reinforce those divisions. Now the new power will do a lot toward that end right away—including taking over these socialized means of production and beginning to use them to meet the material needs of the people and to further the world revolution.

But the morning after victory you will have a society in which people have grown up as members of different social classes. Even leaving aside the big capitalists—which you better not, since they’ll still be around, unreconciled to their dispossession—there will still be distinctions among the people: between those who have been trained in things like medicine, administration, and engineering, on the one hand, and those who lack those kinds of training and have had to work in foundries, the hospitals, or the fields, or have not been able to find any work at all, on the other. And there is also the force of habit from centuries in which the only way that people have come together to carry out the production of life’s necessities has been mediated by—or carried out through—relations where one main class exploits another, and where there is a strict division between those who work with their minds and those who work with their bodies.

Moreover, you will have to deal with all the social relations and ideas that have been conditioned and reinforced by those relations of exploitation. The new power will immediately set about destroying the pillars of this system like white supremacy and male supremacy, and instituting real equality. But even after you initiate these transformations, and even after people’s thinking will begin to be liberated in many ways and reflect the new socialist relations, the centuries of exploitation will nevertheless still have a big effect in people’s thinking. It will be like post-traumatic stress syndrome after a rape; this society and all the people in it have been traumatized by hundreds and thousands of years of oppression and the results in people’s thinking—the racism, the sexism, the USA Number One national chauvinism and the nativist hatred of people from other countries, the elitism, even the feelings of inferiority that are drummed into the masses—these will all be struggled against, but they will not just disappear. And those ideas will feed on the still-remaining inequalities and economic relations which contain aspects of capitalist-type relations but which can’t be wiped out overnight—what is called “bourgeois right.” Political ideas and programs that represent those relations will grow in this soil and assert themselves, and provide a basis for new-born capitalist elements to contest for power. And the new power will have to mobilize the masses to identify, understand, and overcome them.

So it’s not so easy as “well, we just change the economic relations, and the rest falls into place”—and to the extent communists have thought or still think like that, it does a lot of damage. Every arena of society will have to be transformed and revolutionized, over a much longer period of time than anticipated by Marx or Lenin. And all of these realms—as Marx scientifically put it, all the class distinctions, all the production relations on which they rest, all the social relations which arise on that basis, and all the ideas that correspond to those relations—or the “4 alls” for short—will have to be abolished in order to get to, and as part of the process of reaching, communism.11

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Well, the fact is that most people are not going to really take this up as their outlook in the direct aftermath of revolution, fresh out of capitalist society. Bob Avakian has used the metaphor of a parachute to describe how things become compressed at the time of the revolution, how society splits into two poles—one fairly tightly adhering to the revolutionary camp, and the other defending reaction. But after the revolution that compressed character of the people’s pole opens back out, like a parachute. As Avakian wrote in The Basis, the Goals, and the Methods of the Communist Revolution, after the revolution has come to power:

...all the diversity of political programs, outlooks, inclinations, and so on—which reflect, once again, the actual remaining production and social relations that are characteristic of the old society, as well as what’s newly emerging in the society that has been brought into being as a result of the revolutionary seizure and consolidation of power—all these things assert, or reassert, themselves. And if you go on the assumption that, because people all rallied to you at that particular moment when only your program could break through–if you identify that with the notion that they’re all going to be marching in lockstep with you and in agreement with you at every point all the way to communism– you are going to make very serious errors...13

It’s not the second coming, where everyone gets saved and “sees the light”—thank god! It’s a socialist society. You can lead people to do a lot of new things, a lot of important and emancipatory things, and set off a whole process in which people change society and themselves in a positive direction...but it can’t be done as if everyone has suddenly not only understood, but begun to adhere to and apply the communist method, stand, and viewpoint. And if you try to lead as if that is the case, you (a) are not going to be acting in correspondence to what is true, and (b) are going to, as a result, dam up and distort the whole process through which people come to know the truth and you will give rise to a phony, stifling, or chilled atmosphere.

I don't recall discussing Avakian, though I've seen the name around. Haven't read the whole thing yet but found it interesting, it addresses certain aspects that I've had questions about. I haven't seen anything reeking of 'heresy', but perhaps I'm not to well attuned.

So, heterdox, evolutionary or something else?

So, my memory IS shorter than my dick: http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... t=rcp#6742 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=6742&highlight=rcp#6742)

Anyway, here's some internal criticism:

http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2007 ... rs_web.pdf (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/9letters_web.pdf)

Taken together, Avakian and his critics certainly bring up some revelant questions, not sure that I see any answers there. I don't see anything particularly harmful in what the guy has to say(mebbe ya'll can point that out) but I can't see what would inspire a 'cult of personality' either.

I don't recall discussing Avakian, though I've seen the name around. Haven't read the whole thing yet but found it interesting, it addresses certain aspects that I've had questions about. I haven't seen anything reeking of 'heresy', but perhaps I'm not to well attuned.

So, heterdox, evolutionary or something else?

I think we may have talked about Avakian before, maybe with Megan, but with the way the archives work on this site its hard to know for sure. My searches don't work right most of the time.

Anax is better at putting this stuff into perspective than me, because he always has some one-liner or witticism that nails the whole thing, plus he's lived through most of the relevant time periods.

But, I do have a couple thoughts on this.


Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had been students of the dialectical method developed by the German philosopher Hegel. Hegel had grasped that everything in the world constantly changes and develops. This development is driven forward by the conflicting forces that both coexist and struggle within every phenomenon and process. Even when something appears to be relatively stable...struggle, change and development are not only going on within it, but giving it its very character. And Hegel put forward that through this struggle of opposites, one aspect eventually becomes dominant, resulting in a leap to something fundamentally new.

To take one example—which Hegel by the way could not have known—the sun looks like a solid red-hot ball; in reality, it is a mass of continuous thermonuclear explosions which transform the hydrogen at the sun’s core into helium, which radiates heat and light. And our sun will go through stages of development, changing its composition and its size and the amount of heat and light that it gives out, until eventually it dies—and becomes the food for new stars. It is a case of the unity, struggle and mutual transformation of opposites—giving rise to something new.

Paragraph 1 is a pretty decent 5 sentence summary I guess. Paragraph 2 is..maybe not wrong, but superficial. Part of the core of Marxist-Hegelian philosophy is that physical materialism isn't sufficient..you have to have philosophical materialism as well. For instance, Hegel says that there can be no cause without an effect and that the cause is only realized as the posited Cause *through* the effect. In a nutshell, Hegel built his philosophy not solely on experience OR solely on reason.


Marx, and Engels, took Hegel’s great insight of dialectics—that everything changes on account of the struggle of opposed forces—and they stripped it of its idealism; and they took the materialist understanding that reality exists independently of and prior to all thought and stripped that of its mechanical character. The synthesis was dialectical materialism: the understanding that everything in the world goes through constant change and development through the contradictory forces within it, and that human thought itself arises from and reflects this process—and reacts back on it.

I don't exactly buy the Reflection theory but it is a pretty accurate tracing of philosophical thought in Marxism up to Lenin. Anax once told me I wasn't ready to argue about this so there you go :)

The whole next part though, Overcoming Limitiations would probably be called heresy by some. Its sort of unimportant though, because what it is is lunacy. What he tells us is that in the struggle against capitalism:

a. mistakes were made, particularly be the leadership
b. some comrades (again, selectively including leaders) didn't have the proper theoretical perspective
c. a&b combined mean that we have to reinvent the whole shebang from the ground up

After all the talk about materialism in the preceding part, here's where we jump off the deep end. "Mistakes and theoretical defects" triumphs over real-world conditions and the state of social relations at any given moment. Is it a theoretical flaw that prevents a Communist uprising in the United States right now? Is it because comrades have made so many mistakes that they fail to realize visions of a socialist revolution. What craziness.

The criticism of inevitabilism is a little weird. These guys claim they understand the dialectic BUT..

Its like this: history, the history of mankind, is a dialectical movement involving the forces and relations of production (=mode of production). Its the self-development of the concept, only the concept and its development are both grounded in the real world. What dialectics tells us, like any other "law" of nature, is that one stage will be qualitatively negated (ie superceded) by a higher stage.

As an example, BP, this is like saying that organisms adapt and evolve over time. No shit, right?

Socialists believe that the time and conditions are such that socially necessary means of life -- which is much more than bread, water, and shelter -- can be made freely available to everyone -- under the control of the producers -- the workers.

That's nothing that's going to happen in the abstract, that vision of what's possible is borne out of the fact that it is truly is materially possible given the state of the forces of production today (which includes the means of production and the laborers) and given the exploitative relationship between the class that owns everything and the class that produces everything. The alternative is the human race violently wipes itself out.

You can make the exact same analysis under feudalism explaining how and why a bourgeoisie class emerged right under the nose of monarchs, etc

The real criticism of inevitablism is (rightly) directed at those who believe you can simply sit back and wait for the revolution to happen of its own accord. The reason this is a fatuous criticism is simple: who believes that? Does that belief really govern any of the different socialist/communist groups that developed in the 20th century?

The Uptopianism charge is even lamer here. Some Communists think that Communism will be a paradise? Big deal even if they do, that barely matters in the here and now. What's more, the idea is to fight against capitalism, not for "world peace". This by the way doesn't have anything to do with the Utopianism of Proudhon, Owen, Saint-Simon, etc

This part is good:


To say that communism is not inevitable is NOT to say that history is just a jumble. Indeed, there IS a coherence to history, as Marx put it, based on the fact that the productive forces (again, the land, technology, resources and people with their knowledge) are handed down from one generation to another and are constantly developing; and that when the relations that people enter into to carry out production become a fetter on the further development of those forces, big change ensues. Southern slave relations, which for decades coexisted with and fed northern capitalism, eventually became a fetter on the expansion of northern capitalism—and you got a civil war.

Next up come some jive about how, sure the Base (economic) is more important than the Superstructure (culture, legal, political, etc), but nobody UNDERSTANDS the distinction right. Really. Most of Western Marxism went hard for this idea, with Lukacs being the jumping off point afaik (ask Anax). We'll see how far Avakian runs with the ball I guess.

The parts about pragmatism, postivism, etc are totally jumbled up. I guess that is a speech not an academic paper which excuses it a little bit but..I mean, he's got the inklings of an idea but his rebukes are mostly lame or not well developed. You can go to straight to the source ie Engels and Lenin for a sophisticated discussion of this issue and, more importantly, why it matters. To a large extent it really doesn't -- something acknowledged by Gramsci when he conceded that most comrades will be of the "vulgar" variety.

The part about Lysenko and his Lamarckian ideas (that's what we're really talking about) is kind of lame and the jab at Stalin is just some guy flinging crap at random.

I gotta go for a few minutes, but I haven't even gotten to why Avakian is a nut. He's the guy the Monty Python sketch about splitters is talking about.

After all the talk about materialism in the preceding part, here's where we jump off the deep end. "Mistakes and theoretical defects" triumphs over real-world conditions and the state of social relations at any given moment. Is it a theoretical flaw that prevents a Communist uprising in the United States right now? Is it because comrades have made so many mistakes that they fail to realize visions of a socialist revolution. What craziness.

The reason Avakian is a nut is that they call him the "great leader" and all that, and he lets them. Anyway, what you wrote above is much more central. It's the reason that I am a little wary of Gramsci and some others. Since you accuse me of being obtuse, I got two obtuse but relevant stories for ya. The first, "the ancient", is below and the next, "the modern", I'll do when I have a moment.
.

Theseus was the founding hero of Athens and, as with all such ancient heroes, there is a rich mythology which grew up around him. Perhaps the most famous story is that he single-handedly slew the Minotaur, the Cretan monster who was half man and half bull, and who enslaved the Athenians, exacting a terrible tribute each year. Like many such mythical stories, it has been used to shower contempt on the ancients and their silly tales. Also, as with many such mythical stories, this one is probably mostly true. Theseus is separately credited with breaking the hold of the Minoan civilization on Attica. The Minoans, of course, were from Crete and their totem was the bull.

http://www.explorecrete.com/history/images/minotaur-theseus-2.jpg

Be that as it may, Theseus is also credited with a much more practical role. He was "the law-giver", the founding father of the modern-ancient Athenian political constitution, as important as Solon. In this role, perhaps his most important act was the elimination of debt and the banning of the buying and selling of hereditary lands. The background to this is interesting.

The Athenians were a sea-faring people in a very crowded corner of the world. Their liberation from the Cretans brought an immediate challenge to their slowly evolving slave-society which they could never have imagined. Trade flourished. This trade, in turn, brought the widening of the spheres of commerce, the introduction and rapid growth of commodities, the invention and generalization of money, and the creation of "wealth" with which the Ionians could scarcely cope. There being little experience with such things, the Atticans had no traditional limits on the penetration of cash or what could be bought and sold for it. In short order, all that a Greek could want could be gotten merely by getting money. Also in short order, the mortgage was invented. In less than a decade, the traditional lands of the Greek gens were covered by a forest of debt stakes, each one detailing from whom a sum had been borrowed, how much, and so on. The entire riddle of capitalism was thus instantly solved. With the concentration of the traditional lands, perhaps the Greeks could immediately dispense with 2000 years of history to come. They could immediately put to use the steam engine and the other inventions to come to make an immediate transition to manufacturing and so on. The New Jerusalem promised to be a premature birth.

Ah, but such was not to be. Enter Theseus. With a sweep of one heroic hand, he eliminated all of the debts. With the sweep of the other he established a very detailed set of principles as to where and how money could be used in Athenian society, what status those who accumulated and lent money could hold' and strict restrictions on the extent of commoditization. The future was assured.

Now, the obvious question is whether Theseus could have acted differently. The thing is, though, that this is not a question for the Greeks. There is no record in history or story of Thesean and Anti-Thesean factions, or of revisionist Theseans thrice removed. Much like the 19th century bourgeois, the Greeks had a concept of the individual hero through whom history was made. But unlike our modern version, the Greek hero could not make history just as he would like. Instead, he was merely the vehicle through which the history of entire peoples were expressed. To imagine otherwise was an immediate offense against the gods who held an exclusive monopoly on all historical direction.

On this point and several others, Athenian mythology was more advanced and clear-headed than our own.
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Another difference is Chairman Bob would've "pummeled" the Minotaur with sectarian rhetoric rather than swordplay. I suppose there's an off chance the Minotaur would croak of sheer fucking boredom with the whole scene but more likely there'd be white smoke wafting out of the Labyrinth..

Am I to take it that his work is fundamentally solid but that Avakian is just personally weird? Seems like his idea of liberation movements swimming in a sea of great power machinations is right enough, at least on some greater level, though without local conditions being proprietous I don't see how you get the ball rolling. Sigh, I fear I shall always be a 'vulgar comrade', but I'm ok with that.

That business with 'undisclosed locations' is pretty weird too. Who does he think he is, Trotsky?

Am I to take it that his work is fundamentally solid but that Avakian is just personally weird? Seems like his idea of liberation movements swimming in a sea of great power machinations is right enough, at least on some greater level, though without local conditions being proprietous I don't see how you get the ball rolling. Sigh, I fear I shall always be a 'vulgar comrade', but I'm ok with that.

That business with 'undisclosed locations' is pretty weird too. Who does he think he is, Trotsky?

No, his work is crap too

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas ... an?mode=PF (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/27/free_bob_avakian?mode=PF)

Free Bob Avakian!
Oh, he's already free? Never mind.

By Mark Oppenheimer | January 27, 2008

IT WAS HARD to miss, splashed recently across a full page of The New York Review of Books: an advertisement featuring the boldface words, "Dangerous times demand courageous voices. Bob Avakian is such a voice."

Wrapped around those words, Talmud-page-style, were, to the left, a short essay about the importance of Avakian's "compelling approach to Marxism" and, to the right, a list of dozens of signatories, including academic superstars like Cornel West, performers like Rickie Lee Jones and Chuck D., and activists like Cindy Sheehan.

Some of the signatories were regulars on left-wing petitions, but even for people often associated with radical causes, signing a pro-Avakian ad seemed bizarre. Did they not know what he stands for - or did they just not care?

Avakian is the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a tiny Maoist organization whose most visible activity is running several branches of a store called Revolution Books. (There's a branch on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge.) Through the bookstores, the party's website and newspaper, and his prolific pamphleteering, Avakian has advanced his views: Mao Zedong's China was "wondrous," according to Avakian's autobiography, and, despite the show trials, mass purges, and other acts of tyranny that Avakian acknowledges, Joseph Stalin had "an overall positive historical role."

Many of the men and women who signed the ad are respectable scholars - the list also includes Harvard's Brad Epps and Timothy Patrick McCarthy - and I knew it was not possible that they were all actually devoted to Avakian. In fact the ad is lukewarm, at best, on the man's actual politics: "While those of us signing this statement do not necessarily agree with all of [Avakian's] views," the ad says, "we have come away from encounters with Avakian provoked and enriched in our own thinking."

Curious, I began to call around. The first few signatories I tried to reach, including West and Michael Eric Dyson, a prominent African-American studies scholar at Georgetown, did not return my calls or e-mails. Rickie Lee Jones's management company promised to pass along my number, but I never heard from her.

But as I reached others, it became clear that what Avakian represents to them, more than his role as one of the last true believers in revolutionary Maoism, is the ideal of truly free speech.

For the past 25 years Avakian has been ostentatiously underground, whereabouts unknown, his followers insisting that the political climate is too dangerous for so brilliant a critic of America to show his face publicly. The ad plants a stake in the ground on precisely this issue: "We are also serving notice to this government that we intend to defend his right to freely advocate and organize for his views," it reads.

Epps, a Spanish professor, sent an e-mail confirming that this is why he lent his name to the ad. "My support has more to do with freedom of speech than any substantive ideological adherence," he wrote. McCarthy, a historian, said that he signed the ad to show his support for free speech, adding, "If my signing the statement is in any way taken as supporting the views of Bob Avakian, I would reject that."

In the age of the Patriot Act, in the aftermath of a war caused partly by the quiescent media's fear of asking hard questions, liberal and left-thinkers have naturally been quick to defend anybody's free speech. As well they should.

And if this is the person whom so many have chosen to rally around - even though nobody seemed ready to defend Avakian's actual views - then, I figured, he must be quite a remarkable figure.

So I resolved to meet the man himself: Chairman Avakian.

As it happened, I had an idea where to start. When I used to live nearby, I would sometimes kill time by browsing in the Revolution Books in Cambridge. I enjoyed leafing through the pamphlets by Mao, listening to the cashier explain to curious patrons how Deng Xiaoping was a sellout. The small stock always included several shelves devoted to the works of Bob Avakian. It was a name I hadn't thought of in years until I saw the New York Review ad.

The store was now upstairs, having moved when streetside rents got too high. It still had the dusty works by obscure presses, and the books by lefty heroes like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. I asked the new cashier, a serious fellow with an old-school Boston accent named Ben O'Leary, where I could find Bob Avakian.

"It's not something that's going to get discussed," O'Leary said, ominously.

"Do you know where he is?" I asked.

"I'm not saying whether I know or not," O'Leary said.

So I bought a copy of Avakian's autobiography, "From Ike to Mao and Beyond," and left. Taking O'Leary's advice, I called the number that I found on the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and left a message for Carl Dix, the national spokesman. The next day, I got a call back from a Los Angeles talk-radio host, Michael Slate. Dix was not available, Slate said, but instead Slate could speak about Avakian, whose views he "wholeheartedly" supported.

"So did you help write the ad?" I asked.

"I wasn't in the core of putting the ad together," Slate said.

"Can you tell me who was?"

"Why does it matter?"

"Have you met Bob Avakian?"

"I'm not going to say."

"When did you last see him?"

"I would object to that question. It has nothing to do with the article."

I turned to Google, looking for someone who might be able to help. I quickly discovered that Scott McLemee, a critic, essayist, and blogger, had written extensively on Avakian. Once, for an article that never came to pass, he spent months trying to score a meeting with the chairman.

"I wanted to sit down with the guy," McLemee told me on the phone, "and see what Chairman Bob seems like in person. We had meetings which led to meetings which led to meetings. I was told to come to New York, we would have a meeting, I'd be told one way or the other if we could have a meeting or not.

"I came and sat down and was told, 'Yes, we should continue discussions."'

McLemee, who had paid his own way to New York for the meeting, was incensed. "And I was ready to be driven around in the back of a van for eight hours just to meet Bob Avakian," he said.

"What are they scared of?" I asked McLemee.

"There's a real fear there for his safety, which if you saw Malcolm killed and King killed, might be understandable. Except Chairman Bob [is] about as much threat to the US government as my grandmother."

In "From Ike to Mao and Beyond" (2005), Avakian tells the riveting story of a middle-class California boy who moved left during the '60s, first in the Free Speech Movement and Students for a Democratic Society at Berkeley, then with the Black Panthers, and finally into the far-left Maoism of the party he founded in 1975.

In 1979 Avakian was arrested at a demonstration against Deng Xiaoping's visit to the White House; charged with assaulting a police officer, he fled the United States for France. His autobiography contains a picture of a bearded Avakian, wearing a Che-like beret, gazing solemnly at the camera, the caption reading: "[t]he author in exile, in front of the Wall of Communards in Paris, 1981."

And so he remains in exile, a man persecuted in his own land.

Except he isn't. All charges against Bob Avakian were dropped in 1982, as he admits in his book. But the chairman is still on the run, even if nobody is chasing him.

There is a fine line between paranoia and narcissism, and some people live on both sides of it. As the chairman slips further into obscurity, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, has become ever more clearly a cult of personality focused on him. And the move is not subtle: in "Meaningful Revolutionary Work," an essay posted in early January on the party's website, Avakian writes, "One important aspect of boldly spreading revolution and communism everywhere is the work of building what we have characterized as a culture of appreciation, promotion, and popularization around the leadership, the body of work and the method and approach of Bob Avakian."

As one man who for decades has been close to the party told me, "That word 'culture of appreciation' is their word for 'cult of personality."' And Avakian has admitted as much. Once asked by a college radio station if the party was developing a "cult of personality" around Bob Avakian, he replied, "I certainly hope so. We've been working very hard to create one."

The party members are right about one thing, though it's not something they'll admit: Avakian is more of a threat in hiding than visible. The cult of personality would be more difficult to maintain if Avakian were giving speeches, having to answer questions from reporters, or - worse - never being asked questions by reporters. What if Bob Avakian threw a revolution and no one came?

The followers of Bob Avakian want to believe that their chairman is important enough to be hunted. Because if the only people looking for Bob Avakian are Scott McLemee and me, then he hasn't had much of an impact on the world. Which means, too, that if the mainstream left is hitching its free-speech cart to a mule like Bob Avakian, it has even bigger problems.

"It does make you wonder about the acumen, shall we say, of those who sign on," said Todd Gitlin, the sociologist and former president of Students for a Democratic Society, who knew Avakian slightly in the late '60s. "This is a marker of the ludicrous feebleness of the unreconstructed left."

Those who don't agree with Avakian but signed the ad anyway think that voices like his are being suppressed. And some surely are. "Quite frankly," Slate, the LA radio host told me, "we live in an era of Norman Finkelstein, we live in an era of Ward Churchill, we live in an era of Joseph Massad" - academics whose careers have been threatened in part because of their controversial views.

But perhaps such real cases are insufficient rallying cries, even for the oppressed themselves. No one was more certain of Avakian's silencing than Churchill, the former University of Colorado professor who was much attacked for writing in 2001 that "the little Eichmanns" in the World Trade Center were not innocent in their own deaths. I wrote an e-mail to Churchill, who signed the Avakian ad, suggesting that nobody was conspiring to deprive Avakian of the right to speak. He replied, in part, "I mean, you can't possibly be that naive, can you?"

The petition-signing left has many reasons for enabling Bob Avakian's personal mythology. He's a living link to the '60s, an era when American campus radicalism reached its apogee of influence. And he was an outspoken atheist back in the day, too, before Christopher Hitchens and others found bestsellerdom in unbelief; one professor told me he admired Avakian's stand against religious fundamentalism. But above all the Avakian narrative allows civil libertarians to register a vote for free speech, even if they have to ignore the fact that Avakian's speech is in no danger of being suppressed. Rightly concerned about Guantanamo and the Patriot Act, they figure that Avakian is a good proxy fight, or good enough.

As for party members, if they were being honest, their choices would be rather limited. Either they could believe, on scant evidence, that Avakian is being oppressed. Or else America, for all of its faults, isn't as dangerous or malevolent a place as they want to believe. Or, just maybe, America is that terrible, but has more dangerous people to target than Avakian.

The journalist in me really wants to talk this over . . . with Bob Avakian. So Mr. Chairman, let's meet for lunch. You can tell me if I have it all wrong.

Mark Oppenheimer is the author of "Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America" and editor of The New Haven Review.

Okey dokey, paranoid/narcissist, and mebbe his fan club is goofier than he is. So that doesn't make it look so good for his work. But where's the nut case stuff? Hell, I've been of the opinion that the CCP has betrayed the people for quite a while, just on superficial examination. 'Course, I ain't no commie guru.

Well, somewhere in the article I posted is a quote that directly says he's trying to build a cult of personality. But, we can make this into a What An Asshole subthread.

I mean the fact that he fled the country to avoid what seems like a misdemeanor rap (that was dropped)? Here's some real nutcase stuff, courtesy of our pal Alain Badiou. Who, incidentally, has a big impact on Chairman Bob The Great:

http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/03/30 ... ry-theory/ (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/badiou-another-take-on-revolutionary-theory/)

What about Alain Badiou, the contemporary philosopher? Like Zizek, he has attracted much attention among people looking for new avenues both intellectually and politically. A friend in Latin American studies has told me his name is everywhere in Latin American intellectual circles.

Badiou’s background is within Marxism and Maoism. He was a student of the French communist philosopher Louis Althusser in the early sixties, an activist within the French uprisings of May 1968, and a Maoist activist and theorist in the 1970s. He has concluded, beginning in the 1980s and for a nest of reasons both political and philosophical, that this tradition of political practice (that is, basically, the international communist movement as it had emerged that far), has reached a point of “saturation,” as he terms it, and that a new beginning – a new truth-process, as he calls it – is necessary. He has gone on since then to outline a new approach in some very basic fields of philosophy.

In a February 2006 interview at University of Washington, he summed up:

“Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity…. Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field — not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find — with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts — the new synthesis.”

So, does he have worth for us, for our moment, our project, our need to “reconceive as we regroup”? Speaking for myself here, I believe we have, very much, something to learn from him.

Alain Badiou has developed a distinctive philosophical system over the last decades – one sharply focused on understanding the way in which something new, a radical rupture, can jump out of nowhere, changing how we understand ourselves and the situation, and profoundly changing the status quo. His view of ethics revolves around understanding how to have “fidelity” to powerful breaks with conventional thinking, and militantly pursue those breaks as far as they can go – in theory and practice.

His philosophy covers many wide areas, but what relates most closely to concerns on this site is his thinking around the question of how to understand the emergence – the eruption — of deep breaks in the social and political world that challenge (or even demolish) the status quo (which Badiou calls “the situation” and “the state” of affairs).

Such a rupture – Badiou calls it an event, which becomes a special term in his philosophy – such a rupture or event is the start of a process which changes both the world and the people involved in it, and creates and synthesizes new truths. The event is the starting point for both a truth-process and a subject, in Badiou’s terminology. (The subject is not the particular person, but all who participate in the truth-process.)

He gives as examples of “events” such things as the upheaval in France of May 1968 – or equally the birth of modern physics in the time of Galileo. I think it’s easy to see how we could say that out of these was born both a new subject (socially collective, not merely individual), and a truth-process. Neither subject nor truth-process is possible without the other, and they construct each other.

Studying Militancy, Examining Paul

Like most philosophers, Badiou writes very systematically, and to grasp a particular point or passage, some grasp of his overall argument is needed.

I think we can get a better sense of what Badiou is saying by looking a just one of his works – the influential book he wrote on Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.

Paul is generally viewed as a deeply reactionary character by Marxists and even by many progressive Christians. One could say that Paul took an early egalitarian Jewish sect, and played a pivotal role in transforming it into an established Church with a novel, codified doctrine, and the ability to “take over” the Roman empire, Europe and beyond.

So why does a revolutionary like Badiou write about Paul? Well – we don’t need to just examine an historical figure like this from the point of view of “was his doctrine correct?” or “do we see him as reactionary?”

Badiou is examining Paul as an archetype of militancy – as a person with “fidelity” to a world historic “event” and the “truth-process” emerging from it (in this case, a resurrection [undocumented to be sure] and a certain universal set of messages that were unprecedented for their times.)

On the second page of this book, Badiou characterizes Paul as someone who “practices and states the invariant features of what can be called the militant figure.”

Badiou goes on to say, “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure¼called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant.”

He thinks that now, when such a step forward is needed, a look back at the distant and apparently very dissimilar case of Paul is highly illuminating.

Badiou says he wants to trace the connection, embodied in Paul, “between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-process which is this rupture’s subjective materiality.” It’s the connection, in other words, between an event and the truth-process and the subject which are both born out of it. The “militant figure” is the militant of a truth-process and part of a new subjectivity. (Subjectivity in this philosophical sense does not mean, as in Maoist usage, being un-objective or anti-scientific. It means in this case, being a new subject (or part of a new social subject), a newly defined and awakened actor on the social stage and within the new process of truth-formation.)

To rephrase slightly, Badiou’s quest is for a new way to be a revolutionary in our present circumstances. He approaches Paul in this light, for those reasons, and interprets Paul’s life and practice in terms of his own (Badiou’s) philosophy of event, subject, truth-process, and fidelity. A “new militant figure” would be the militant of a new truth process.

That’s the background of his concern with Paul. He goes on to say that what he’s going to focus on in Paul’s work is “a singular connection, which it is formally possible to disjoin from the fable [that is, Christianity] and of which Paul is…the inventor: the connection that establishes a passage between a proposition concerning a subject and an interrogation concerning the law.”

What Paul contributed, Badiou believes, is the insight and practice of separating truths (and truth-processes) from their particular historical context. Badiou opposes this to the contemporary practices of dissolving truths into forms of cultural, linguistic or historical relativisms.

A Universal Singularity

In the world today, Badiou says, on the one hand there is a vast “extension of the automatisms of capital,” which imposes “the rule of an abstract homogenization,” while “on the other side there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation.” Both of these processes, and their ideological expressions, are inimical and deadly to the creation of new truth today. Moreover, the two processes are complementary:

“Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action….”

A new truth-procedure, Badiou believes, will on the one hand interrupt and disrupt the repetition of the same which is the logic imposed by capital. On the other hand: although the eruption of new truth is a singular process, “its singularity is immediately universalizable.” In other words: a truth-process originates in a particular event, breaking out at a particular time and place; but the process is one which brings into being new truths which are universal, or which can be universalized. So the truth-process also breaks with particular identities and relativist logic.

Badiou concludes in this line of thought:

“Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?” (All quotes in the last few paragraphs are from the first chapter of Badiou’s Saint Paul.)

It is precisely on this question that he thinks it’s helpful to look at Paul, because this is his (Paul’s) question. A dispute arose between Paul and the historic apostles in Jerusalem (Peter and some others), apparently concerning whether all Christians need be circumcised, that is, whether they needed to take on the traditional marks of belonging to the Jewish community. The position in Jerusalem was yes, because they saw Jesus as fulfilling the process of Judaism. Paul said no:

“In his eyes, the event renders prior markings obsolete, and the new universality bears no privileged relation to the Jewish community.” (Badiou, 23)

Badiou sides with Paul on the general issue involved. The question, rephrased in Badiou’s terms, is this:

“What is the relation between the supposed universality of the postevental truth (that is, what is inferred from Christ’s resurrection) and the evental site, which is, indubitably, the nation bound together by the Old Testament?” (22)

This becomes for Badiou a general question about the relation between the old and the new, after the occurrence of an event: Does the new truth incorporate the old within it, or is there a decisive break? Badiou believes there is a break.

This relates to what Badiou is getting at in talking of “universal singularity.”An event is singular and unique: it breaks with the boundaries and categories of the situation out of which it erupts. But the event marks the beginning of a truth-process, which is a process of creating universal truths.

So you could say that the break-out represented by an event, and its initiation of a truth-process, is how singular –> universal works. But Badiou also wants to stress what is something like the reverse process: how the truth which is essentially universal, traverses the differences and particularities of the world: “With regard to the world in which truth proceeds, universality must expose itself to all differences and show, through the ordeal of their division, that they are capable of welcoming the truth that traverses them.” (106)

Mass Line

This becomes one of Badiou’s chief themes in this book: the way in which new universal truths “traverse” or travel through and incorporate the differences and particularities of the world. “It is in fact the search for new differences,” he says,

“New particularities to which the universal might be exposed, that leads Paul beyond the evental site properly speaking (the Jewish site) and encourages him to displace the experience historically, geographically, ontologically. Whence a highly characteristic militant tonality, combining the appropriation of particularities with the immutability of principles, the empirical existence of differences with the essential nonexistence, according to a succession of problems requiring resolution, rather than through an amorphous synthesis.”

Badiou then quotes Paul from Corinthians I (First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, in the New Testament):

“For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law—though not being myself under the law—that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law—not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ—that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men. “(Cor. I.9.19-22)

Badiou says:

“This is not an opportunist text, but an instance of what Chinese communists will call ‘the mass line,’ pushed to its ultimate expression in ‘serving the people.’ It consists in supposing that, whatever people’s opinions and customs, once gripped by a truth’s postevental work, their thought becomes capable of traversing and transcending those opinions and customs without having to give up the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.” [St. Paul, page 99]

What to think? Well, let’s take a more familiar political example. Suppose you are a revolutionary militant or cadre. You have been grasped in your life and activated by a great eruption in the world, and the experience has completely up-ended the conventional system of facts and categories and hierarchies – all that you thought you knew. You have entered into a process of synthesizing and recognizing and establishing new truths in the world, a process which is not just yours, but yours along with many others. I am sure many of us on this site have experienced this, and have entered into such processes, and have had this shape our lives.

Let’s say that these new truths are universal (in the sense of being “addressed to all” as Badiou often puts it). These truths demand to be made real in the world, which means changing the world. Wrong ways of approaching this demand: either preaching to people (“here’s the truth; accept it, believe it”), or enforcing it as truth, if you have the power to do that (“here’s the truth; you must accept it or else”). Rather, the truth has to be made real in the world, not by opposing itself abstractly to the differences and particularities of people and groups, but through them. This would be what the mass line is about, as Badiou is interpreting it here. “From the masses, to the masses” – taking “the ideas of the masses,” synthesizing them through the universal truth in a way that does not dissolve their particularity, and bringing them “back to the masses.”

And this is what Badiou sees in this text of Paul: an expression of how a truth, universal in character and sweep, can come to “seize the masses” in a way which does not obliterate or abolish “the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.”

Mao’s “mass line” has often been understood as addressing questions of methods of leadership (“learning while leading, leading while learning”) or political work (concentrating and sifting out correct from incorrect in the ideas of the masses, then “returning” them in the form of line and policy). As such, it remains on the level of means and policy. Badiou, however, is seeing it as a way in which the universal becomes particular, and how a new truth becomes materially expressive within and through individual people and groups. It is a profound philosophical question, as well as profoundly political.

There’s much more to his thinking, which is very rich and variegated. There’s a lot in Badiou that one can argue with, and I am still grappling with his thought. But he’s one of the very few really original, deep, and path-breaking philosophers of the present – and someone who’s seriously trying to think or rethink the questions of revolution (or of a truly emancipatory politics, as he prefers to say). These ideas are not repackagings of our own familiar Marxisms… they are often strange to us, as if the same world and problems are suddenly seen from a new angle with fresh eyes. It is provocative and thought-provoking. And for those reasons alone, there’s a lot of value in his work (we need it, in fact) and he needs to be seriously engaged — irrespective of whether we adopt his philosophical system as a whole, or any particular aspects of it.

Here's some more selective quotes from assorted links..this guy isn't worth alot of time IMO


Today, revolutionary ferment in society, and the study and debate of revolutionary theory, have yet to make a new upsurge. Every group calling itself revolutionary is small, with anti-revisionists (Marxists in more than name only) being the smallest of the small. In these conditions the RCP is a significant force in the left-wing movement. They get their strength, partially, because of the weakness of the anti-revisionist trend. They attract activists through revolutionary posturing in the anti-war, anti-racist and other popular movements, posing as the most revolutionary force out there. Yet, their leftism is illusory, because their greatest source of strength is through alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie, and to make those alliances, they must drop their revolutionary phrase-mongering and fall back to liberal emotionalism. In other words, for all their left posturing, their petty bourgeois outlook and their alliance with the left wing of the liberal bourgeoisie drives them to refuse to wage a real struggle against the liberal and opportunist politics dominating these movements.

. One feature of the party that stands out is their adulation for Avakian. May 1st of this year the RCP introduced a newly formatted, renamed newspaper called Revolution to much fanfare. In that issue they pour on the worship of Avakian particularly thick, but examples abound elsewhere also, in other issues before and after, on the web, and in talks. RCP members refer to themselves as "comrades and students of RCP Chairman Bob Avakian", and argue that "if you want to change the world . . . you need to know Bob Avakian". They talk of the need to "cherish him and defend" him, because "a leader like this only comes along once in a great while". We are called on to read his memoirs and listen to "the whole 11-hour DVD set" of Bob Avakian speaking, and hold parties to view it with everyone we know. One article describes an immigrant working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, who takes his one day off on New Years day to travel to the Rose Bowl parade and "tell people about Bob Avakian", and claims that in the projects in LA people now greet each other by "putting their fists to their hearts and shouting out, 'B. A. '". Someone even "begins to cry as he hears of the future envisioned by Bob Avakian -- 'People need this kind of leader to unleash their creativity'". One acolyte is quoted on their website saying "if Lenin were alive today, he'd sound a lot like Bob Avakian". (2) At demonstrations, these students of Avakian have chanted "The earth is quakin'/ Follow Bob Avakian/ The empire's shakin'/ Follow Bob Avakian!" LAME!


His argument rests on the correct proposal that particular ideas carry a certain prestige due to their having held up to criticism and shown their correctness in practice; this assertion is uncontroversial, one relevant example being the writings of Marx and Engels. Yet, the RCP turns this on its head: both in their theoretical justifications and in their practice, rather than analyzing the difficult questions today, instead they seek to build up their prestige, and hope no one will notice the emptiness of their answers. In fact, because they are so devoid of answers, this cultism is the only basis on which it is possible to promote Avakian's work and that of other RCP "theorists".

. For example, they don't have a serious analysis of the revolutions in either Russia or China, or how and why they ended in repressive state capitalist regimes. Instead, they provide pat answers: in the Soviet Union, "when Stalin died in 1953, capitalist forces inside the Communist Party, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, staged a coup"; in China, "after Mao died in 1976, rightist forces, led by Deng Xiaoping from behind the scenes, staged a coup . . .". (4)

..

By contrast Marx and Engels studied the revolutions of their time deeply, and communists today need to do serious study of the revolutions since. They also studied capitalism as it existed in their day. While the basic principles they discovered about capitalism then still apply today, capitalism has developed since then. Lenin furthered their study, but capitalism has developed since Lenin's time too. Communists need to draw lessons from these developments to effectively fight the struggles of today, and the RCP has no answers here either. They also don't have any serious ideas about how to develop a proletarian movement independent of the Democrats and their allies. Instead, their answer is fear-mongering and cultism, and assertions of how really, really revolutionary they are. Marxism can't be satisfied with providing simple answers. It has to continually test and retest its basic methods and standpoint by applying them to new questions, and breaking new ground.

. In place of this, on the one hand the RCP tries to promote a sense of panic, with accounts that "history is full of examples of people . . . passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined" and that if "things are left in the hands of those in power, we could be living in a world where old traditional shackles meet new technology. . . . This horrible vision would be a society where modern-day imperialism would be run by religious fanatics. Your worst nightmare meets your worst nightmare" [their emphasis].


In the "Individual Leaders . . ." article and elsewhere, in place of really grappling with difficult questions, he repeatedly uses pseudo-dialectics to make it sound like he is doing so. In this technique of argumentation, he makes two contradictory statements and calls it "a dialectic", but makes no effort to talk about how they relate to each other. Then he simply picks whichever side of the so-called-dialectic suits his needs, and ignores the other. One critic on the web described this as waving the "dialectical magic wand".

. For example, he brings up the "dialectical relation" between cultism and "initiative and creative critical thinking among party members and the masses following the party", but says nothing more about the question. Cultism stifles intellectual initiative among the masses, but Avakian finds it more convenient for his argument to say "dialectical relation", and then prattle on about "the positive and necessary aspect" of cultism. In the same article, he states that "on the other hand . . . truth . . . in the beginning is always in the hands of the minority of people" and that "Mao makes the statement that people should follow whoever has the truth in their hands." He raises this point a couple of ways, and then again simply returns to his discussion of the supposed positive nature of cults. Again, he doesn't discuss the relationship between the two ideas.

. These and several other examples in that article alone, clearly show that his aim is not to shed light on the question, but to obscure the emptiness of his arguments, to assure his readers that he is really thinking about things deeply, to sound "communist" and thoughtful, and to make what are often very simple-minded, empty and wrong arguments seem deeper and richer and more all-sided. Real dialectical materialism is a tool to understand and clarify the laws by which change occurs. Simply stating two contradictory things and saying they have a "dialectical relation", and then choosing one (the "unity" between cultism and mass initiative) and ignoring the other (the "opposition" between them), clarifies nothing except the speaker's opportunism, and actually serves to obscure reality. (7)


. Their lack of proletarian party spirit, the elitism which comes with their cultism, the weakness of their arguments, all reveal their class orientation.Their practice shows it too: they do not organize among the workers. Doing so is difficult today, given the current lack of ferment in society, and few groups do much of it. But the RCP has given up on the workers entirely, and for the most part dropped even mention of the working class in their writings. In their Draft Programme (one of the few places they do mention the proletariat), they talk of fighting against a "reactionary polarization" created by the bourgeoisie, and they say that "the proletariat, through the leadership of its party, seeks to bring about a 'favorable repolarization', by waging a 'fight for the middle'." The phrase 'fight for the middle" is a euphemism; what it really means is ignoring the workers, and focusing on other segments of society, the petty-bourgeoisie and left-liberal Democrats.

. They go further, and argue that this "fight for the middle" is really the hardest and most revolutionary work: "if the proletariat writes off potential allies, if it shrinks from waging that 'fight for the middle', as difficult as it is, then it will fall short in making revolution". They argue that for its part, the bourgeoisie is also fighting "to enlist the support of the middle strata . . . seeking to convince them [the proletariat] they will have no allies when they fight back". This entire discussion sounds as if a) they believe that the proletariat is already completely behind them and does not need to be organized, or b) their declaration that they are the party which is leading the proletariat is sufficient, and it isn't necessary to take any action to actually lead the actual workers, or c) that by waging this fight for the middle, the RCP will convince the workers that they do have allies (in the kinder gentler imperialists, the liberal Democrats, mind you), and this will give them courage to organize themselves. (8)

. A practical example of their abandonment of working class politics for left-liberalism is their current call to "Drive out the Bush Regime" quoted above. It reads in part "But silence and paralysis are NOT acceptable. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn -- or be forced -- to accept. There is no escaping it the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take the responsibility to do it." While it is always good to fight against Bush, the arch-imperialist, this sort of guilt-tripping emotionalism is the stock-in-trade of the left-liberals, and it reflects the RCP's attitude toward the masses as backward and bought out, and as hopeless as a revolutionary force. This event is called for November 2nd, a Wednesday, the anniversary of Bush's reelection. It talks as though tens of thousands simply HAVE TO walk out of work and classes, or disaster will ensue. Meanwhile, even though it makes a reference to there being "no savior from the Democratic Party", it makes no mention of the imperialist nature of that party, and no mention of the class which both Bush and the Democrats serve, the bourgeoisie.

. While it is possible to find common ground in certain struggles and at certain stages during the struggle, between the working class and sections of the petty-bourgeoisie, the RCP approach -- abandonment of working class politics and organizing primarily among the petty-bourgeoisie, while still trying to pose as Marxist -- requires them to extract any class analysis from their writings, leaving little but empty emotional and moral appeals and sophistry, and because they are empty, the only way left to promote themselves is by cultist appeals.

. So they have adopted this cultism for a number of reasons. In order to hide the tame liberal reformist politics they're hawking, to hide their real class allegiances, and to try to sound so very revolutionary, they talk of Avakian as "a pathbreaking Marxist thinker" who has a "vision", and who has "reimagined the process of socialist revolution", one who "we can have so much confidence in", and therefore don't need to "stress out" about the difficult problems of building a proletarian movement. Instead of organizing among the workers, their focus is on making themselves appealing to left liberals and petty-bourgeois radicals, and on drawing their strength from the left Democrats, summed up under their slogan "Unite all who can be united". <>

http://home.flash.net/~comvoice/36cCult.html

And as an even more ludicrous example:


he first thing I should point out, is that Avakian makes the statement, "there is nothing more revolutionary than genuine communism," [part 1] when he begins his argument against Anarchism. Or elsewhere, "...we might actually come off as more conservative than anarchism, when in fact, as has been stressed, we're much more radical than anarchists. " [part 1] And we also have, "While at times anarchism may appear extremely radical and appear to be criticizing Marxism from a more 'left' position, anarchism is essentially reformist." [part 2] Or... "This has to do with the fact that, regardless of the intentions and sentiments of particular anarchists, anarchism as a program and outlook is ultimately the expression of petit bourgeois interests..." [part 2] Or even, "This is what is reflected in the program of the anarchists--as a radical expression of the petit bourgeois democratic outlook--and in particular their demands for no state, no vanguard party, no leadership (or "hierarchies") of any kind, including within the armed forces of the revolution, both before and after the seizure of power (if power could ever be seized without such leadership!!). " [part 4] His opponents, allegedly, had argued that Anarchism was more revolutionary than Communism. Of course, this all seems good and qualified, when we want to have a debate about some topic in our elementary school yard. It doesn't matter what is "more revolutionary," nor should it even seem slightly relevant to the discussion. If I were to argue against Statist-Communism on behalf of Anarcho-Communism, I would not begin with, "Yeah, well, you know what's more revolutionary than Statist-Communism? That's right, Anarcho-Communism." Avakian would look to me and his head would bow down, speaking only to his comrades, "You know, he's right..." And then he would leave as I won the debate. Of course, demonstrating the rather absurd nature of this argument, and the valuable seconds which have already been lost on examining it, I continue.

In street language, Chairman Bob The Great is a fucking poser, ya dig? ;)

http://www.punkerslut.com/critiques/avakian/mlm.html

http://pddemocratici.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/berlinguer-media.jpg

This is Enrico Berlinguer. He was the head of the Italian Communist Party from 1972 to 1984. Charming, articulate, sharp as a tack, protégé of Togliatti, a partisan in 1943 and imprisoned for it, he was the model of a new European communist. I hated the summabitch. He was a founder of "Eurocommunism" and unlike Carrillo (who was a fool), and Marchais (who I really never believed), he knew a lot of shit and he still meant the Eurocommunist thing. Everything that I believed and lived for, he seemed to undermine. The foul shit he said hit a pinnacle for me when he sold out the Portuguese. I ranted endlessly about the fucker.

I had a friend. He was my contemporary but he had been a red-diaper baby, schooled in the black arts since early childhood. He was brilliant and exceedingly serious. His life was devoted to the movement. He was also excessively serene, which was often infuriating. He had spent several years in Italy with the PCI.

My friend would listen to me rant without comment. When I was exhausted, he would say something like, "you don't understand...” That would start me up again...

"What don't I understand? He's fuckin' Kautsky."

"The workers love Berlinguer. They never love social-democrats. They love Berlinguer, though. He is the head of the party of the Italian proletariat. That is decisive. What you 'think' doesn't matter."

"All the workers can't love Berlinguer..."

"ALL the workers love Berlinguer... If you don't like it, take it up with them."

In 1976, the PCI polled 35% of the vote in the Italian elections. That was virtually the entire industrial proletariat and a goodly number of teachers, office workers and so on. When NONE of Berlinguer's alliances worked (not the "historic compromise"; not the "alliance of the left" with the worthless Italian Socialists), he turned the PCI toward local elections and at one point 60% of the municipal and regional governments were run by the PCI. They were the first clean and efficient local governments in Italian history.

Then, in 1984, Berlinguer suffered a brain hemorrhage and died. This was his funeral:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrn1d1ppgWg

One million workers came out in the streets of Rome. It was a sea of red, the biggest demonstrations in the history of Italy.

Of course, after that, everything came apart. Eventually, the PCI disbanded itself, in favor of becoming right wing social-democrats and even that failed. The left-wing "critics" proved themselves less than worthless. Almost nothing survives except spontaneous choruses of Bandiera Rosa at the end of long evenings of drinking, sung badly by old drunks and young romantics. But... they still love Berlinguer:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ZX55WX8DL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ubjn6MQQc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55yCQOioTyY

A few years later, I was a wary fan of Gorbachev when he was on the rise. I ran into my friend and mentioned that. "You are very wrong about him", he said. "Gorbachev is a very dangerous man."

"What the fuck, Fuck, FUCK?” said I. "You defended Berlinguer but you think Gorbachev is 'dangerous'?"

"The workers don't love Gorbachev...” he said.

Damned if he wasn't right about that too.

http://www.indignato.it/2007/09/03/benigni%20berlinguer.jpg

Anax, maybe your friend was right but I'm not sure I can agree with him. At that time it had to look something like this:

The leadership was co-opted, scared shitless of being another Chile, and ideologically aligned against the SU, a legacy dating all the way back to the 30s.

BUT, in the Eurocommunists the bourgeoisie were playing with fire. Let them actually have power? Shit, Berlinguer would've had no choice but to hold on and pray (the people will wad us up like a spitball remember?). Try to point the Eurocommunists against the USSR (no doubt a much coveted item on the booge agenda)? Shit, they wouldn't have touched off another Vietnam, they would've touched off the Third World War. Basically capitalism couldn't deliver on the bullshit reformist promises, not this time. The sheen of the 50s and 60s was a long gone by the mid-70s.

As much as the fuckers sold out (and fuck them, they did), the bigger question was whether reformism had the potential to quash the actual spontaneous rise of the proletariat all over the world (at the behest of the capitalists). The answer was the same in 1977 as it was in 1848, 1917, 1930,1947, etc: "no". Socialism survived the Kautsky's, Hilferdings, Noske's, etc

But, Anax, at that time one fucking third of the world was held by the workers and the preceding 50 years were some of the most intense struggles in history. I don't know what the hell happened between then and now, but things changed. A friend told me that the Soviet Union didn't dissolve so much as hang up a "going out of business" sign. Whatever that's supposed to mean.

Anax, maybe your friend was right but I'm not sure I can agree with him. At that time it had to look something like this:

The leadership was co-opted, scared shitless of being another Chile, and ideologically aligned against the SU, a legacy dating all the way back to the 30s.

BUT, in the Eurocommunists the bourgeoisie were playing with fire. Let them actually have power? Shit, Berlinguer would've had no choice but to hold on and pray (the people will wad us up like a spitball remember?). Try to point the Eurocommunists against the USSR (no doubt a much coveted item on the booge agenda)? Shit, they wouldn't have touched off another Vietnam, they would've touched off the Third World War. Basically capitalism couldn't deliver on the bullshit reformist promises, not this time. The sheen of the 50s and 60s was a long gone by the mid-70s.

As much as the fuckers sold out (and fuck them, they did), the bigger question was whether reformism had the potential to quash the actual spontaneous rise of the proletariat all over the world (at the behest of the capitalists). The answer was the same in 1977 as it was in 1848, 1917, 1930,1947, etc: "no". Socialism survived the Kautsky's, Hilferdings, Noske's, etc

But, Anax, at that time one fucking third of the world was held by the workers and the preceding 50 years were some of the most intense struggles in history. I don't know what the hell happened between then and now, but things changed. A friend told me that the Soviet Union didn't dissolve so much as hang up a "going out of business" sign. Whatever that's supposed to mean.

That's kinda the point, kiddo. The crisis of capitalism caused the First World War and then the Second. The European Communist parties were as much a result of that as the Bolshevik revolution. In France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, and others, resistance to Fascism created the circumstances for the rise of the Communist parties. After the war, a situation developed in which it was difficult to to move forward and difficult to move back. What now?

The Soviet Union unraveled... it's easy to see why and it has nothing to do with authoritarianism or bureaucracy or other such silly talk. It was too much "war communism", for too long... 2 World Wars, a Civil War, 2 occupations which set the needle back to zero, 2 huge famines, industrialization two separate times, and then the cold war. Too many bodies and too many Prague Springs lookin' for Starbucks while people were askin' why they couldn't have Hummers and Wranglers too... Afghanistan and the crazy Chinese and wtf are the 'Merican right-wingers talkin' about now?

In Europe it was too much post-war "prosperity". Portugal was the exact opposite of Italy and yet the result was the same. The workers loved Cunhal and Vasco too, and relatively speaking, the funerals were even bigger. A million mistakes were made in each country and a million different ones were avoided but in the end, it was identical. It was impossible to hang on.

Twenty years later it looks different... but my friend was still right whether either one of us 'thinks' so or not. The articles you have published from your Trot and your Maoist are indications of that. Even they are beginning to rethink, starting with what is familiar. I see the same thing every day.
.

I don't remember posting anything by a Maoist in a while..my forgetfulness probably..

EDIT: in case I'm really fucking obtuse, these stories have zip to do with Avakian right?

EDIT #2: you mean the Mumia article didn't you

I don't remember posting anything by a Maoist in a while..my forgetfulness probably..

The state capitalism guy in eat's thread. "Hmmm... in the face of Blackwater and Exxon, maybe 'state capitalism' isn't so bad?"

They gotta lose the insults-catechism though. It's fuckin' dated and the "freedom" guys are pretty much exposed these days.

On Edit: those stories have everything to do with Avakian

On Edit: those stories have everything to do with Avakian

Damn, I really thought I was getting it too..

EDIT: OK, I take it back. I gotcha, but you ARE obtuse :D

And the Maoist guy (I thought he was a Stalinist) is off at a right angle on this I think:


The theory of state monopoly capitalism ("Stamocap" or "Stamokap" theory) was initially a Marxist doctrine popularised after World War II. Lenin had claimed in 1916 that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopoly capitalism, but he did not publish any extensive theory about the topic. The term refers to an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to protect large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from competition by smaller firms (Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought).

Stamocap theory aims to define the final historical stage of capitalism following monopoly capitalism, consistent with Lenin's definition of the characteristics of imperialism in his short pamphlet of the same name.

Occasionally the stamocap concept also appears in neo-Trotskyist theories of state capitalism as well as in libertarian anti-state theories. The analysis made is usually identical in its main features, but very different political conclusions are drawn from it.

from Wikipedia

I think I said this before but I can't personally tell if this is any different from The Great Transformation and if so how. I read the Maoist guy's article, he quotes some Soviet economists, Eugen Varga and I forget who else. You're right that he goes hard on the sectarian stuff. Come to think of it, I'm pretty darn sure he's a Stalinist..

Seems to me that all of this 'cult of personality' bidness gives a leg up to anarchist arguments.

Not that I' going there, mind you, just sayin'. They're kinda like me, lotta questions, not so many answers, at least not good ones.

Seems to me that all of this 'cult of personality' bidness gives a leg up to anarchist arguments.

Not that I' going there, mind you, just sayin'. They're kinda like me, lotta questions, not so many answers, at least not good ones.

Hey BP, I was just reading through the archives looking for the thread you mentioned in your PM and I stumbled on an old post by Mike that might help sort this out. Its like Anax's story w/o the need for a magic decoder ring (kidding, kidding).

Mike wrote this:


... The importance of a politician is not his or her "stands on issues" - rather it is what effect they have - who they attract, what their followers are like, and what the people are able to do within the context that the politician creates.

and Anaxarchos replied:


This is very good, Mike, and it is suprisingly incomprehensible to many who define themselves as "left-wing". At the same time that you were getting bounced around on Kucinich, you put up a thread on Edwards. I was genuinely surprised at how few understood what you were getting at.

Let us say that Edwards is the most cynical of politicians, who is only playing the "class card" in order to compete against Clinton. Let us further stipulate that he would become a Mummer if he thought that it could get him elected president. What difference does it make?

How can it be bad for Edwards to raise the class issue explicitly when it hasn't really been done in Democratic politics since Henry Wallace?

Who is more important as a progressive candidate - Kucinich, who will orchestrate a tiny flame-out with a confusing litany of issues unknown to most people, or Edwards, who promises to raise our "issue", in a clear-cut way, even if he really, REALLY, doesn't mean it?

Don't get me wrong. Edwards has a good ways to go yet before it is indeed clear that he will run on class, but how is it possible to make him less important than a symbolic gesture?

Don't tell me if I got it all wrong Anax..I don't wanna know!

[quote=blindpig]Seems to me that all of this 'cult of personality' bidness gives a leg up to anarchist arguments.

Not that I' going there, mind you, just sayin'. They're kinda like me, lotta questions, not so many answers, at least not good ones.

Hey BP, I was just reading through the archives looking for the thread you mentioned in your PM and I stumbled on an old post by Mike that might help sort this out. Its like Anax's story w/o the need for a magic decoder ring (kidding, kidding).

Mike wrote this:


... The importance of a politician is not his or her "stands on issues" - rather it is what effect they have - who they attract, what their followers are like, and what the people are able to do within the context that the politician creates.

and Anaxarchos replied:


This is very good, Mike, and it is suprisingly incomprehensible to many who define themselves as "left-wing". At the same time that you were getting bounced around on Kucinich, you put up a thread on Edwards. I was genuinely surprised at how few understood what you were getting at.

Let us say that Edwards is the most cynical of politicians, who is only playing the "class card" in order to compete against Clinton. Let us further stipulate that he would become a Mummer if he thought that it could get him elected president. What difference does it make?

How can it be bad for Edwards to raise the class issue explicitly when it hasn't really been done in Democratic politics since Henry Wallace?

Who is more important as a progressive candidate - Kucinich, who will orchestrate a tiny flame-out with a confusing litany of issues unknown to most people, or Edwards, who promises to raise our "issue", in a clear-cut way, even if he really, REALLY, doesn't mean it?

Don't get me wrong. Edwards has a good ways to go yet before it is indeed clear that he will run on class, but how is it possible to make him less important than a symbolic gesture?

Don't tell me if I got it all wrong Anax..I don't wanna know![/quote:smar8ljk]

Yeah, I got all that, particularly the Edwards thing, which looked like it was moving the conversation in a dangerous direction before it was snuffed out.(Edwards WAS a Mummer). Thing about Avakian is that he might(still trying to figure that out) have something relevant to say, but due to his ego/ paranoia and his fan club any relevance gets lost. "Who it attracts", who are these RCPs anyway? I don't see how cults of personality have any place in socialist thought, way too hierarchial for this old dog.