Nine Letters to Our Comrades

Letter 1: A Time to Speak Out Clearly

by Mike Ely

For more than ten years Charles Darwin said nothing publicly about (what he called) his “very presumptuous work.” He wrote that talking about natural selection (even to friends) was “like confessing a murder.” [2] There were reasons for Darwin’s reluctance. He worried about possible errors in his analysis. He feared open debate might have unexpected consequences. But Darwin’s delay had to end and did. [3]

Without overstating an analogy, revolutionary communists need to undertake a “very presumptuous work.” It requires working through problems, not treating them as dark secrets. We too have reasons for caution. Our disputes take place within reach of a ruthless enemy. Yet, we need to deal with difficult truths about our movement, experiences and beliefs.

A very presumptuous work.

Even the most revolutionary forces have been lagging seriously. In the thirty years since Mao’s death, there has not been another communist revolution, and a whole generation has grown up without revolutionary societies. Communism is not contending within the deep channels of the world’s politics, culture or thought. International efforts to regroup communist forces have not overcome long-standing fractures. As rapid changes rework this planet, there have rarely been parallel innovations in communist understanding and work.

The experience of the last century has convinced many that communist revolution has been a failed dream. And yet, rising from every corner of life, weighing on the brain like a living nightmare, there it is: the horrifying suffering of people and the mounting crimes of this system.

Faced with these challenges, revolutionary communism is dividing into two around us. Or to be more precise: Events are revealing how much this movement already exists as two, three, many Maoisms. Several distinct conceptions now contend among Maoists. [4] There is sharp struggle over how to make the breakthroughs we need in both communist theory and revolutionary practice.

Because these letters develop a critique of Bob Avakian’s new synthesis, I’d like to start by acknowledging positive aspects of what he and the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA (RCP) have represented: For decades, the RCP as been an important pole around which revolutionary communist forces could rally. There has been a long, serious, stubborn, principled effort by the RCP and its leadership core to solve problems that far too many others simply believed were unsolvable. This party has been determined to find a way to actually bring down U.S. imperialism from within. And Bob Avakian, in particular, has churned over many key questions of communist revolution, keeping them before others, refusing to settle for anything less.

There have been periods over the last decades when it appeared the RCP’s leadership might be on the road toward those leaps we need. Avakian has long argued that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism should be approached non-dogmatically — as a developing “synthesis.” He later called for making communism a “wrangling” and “self-interrogating” movement. And more recently, he urges communists to fearlessly confront often-difficult truths. He says communists should refuse to be a “residue of the past,” and should fight to become a “vanguard of the future.” [5]

And yet… and yet… the RCP has proven to be one of the disappointments of this moment. After raising some of the right questions, this party prematurely rushed to embrace a synthesis that falls short. As a result, a stark set of contradictions now defines the RCP.

There has been a devastating contrast between Avakian’s talk of critical scientific thinking and the crudely un-critical thinking that surrounds this party’s escalating cult of personality.

Avakian made welcome criticisms of simplistic methodologies (including of the reductionism [6] and inevitabilism [7]of several of his party’s more notorious errors. [8]) But then, the RCP put forward yet another over-reaching analysis. This time it is that there is a post-911 ruling class lurch toward theocratic fascism that is creating the outlines of a “coming civil war” and could become a “stage manager” for socialist revolution in the period ahead. [9]

Avakian criticized the method of manipulating people by fudging the truth, but his party is jacking people up using instrumentalist predictions. [10] Seeking (once again) to “keep the advanced elements tense,” the party is insisting (once again) that the world is rushing rapidly toward a very specific, irreversible disaster and that only this Chairman and his supporters can save the day.

In words, Avakian talks about the masses in their millions being the makers of history, while the party seems to move further and further away from actually organizing people in struggle and extending living roots among the oppressed.

Meanwhile the militant and heart-felt internationalism so closely associated with the RCP is being deeply compromised. For the last year, the living revolution of Nepal has been treated with a long sour public silence by the RCP. [11]

Many people see this as a bewildering disconnect between Avakian “talking the talk” and his party somehow failing to “walk the walk.” But that summation doesn’t get past the superficial appearance of things. Whatever else can be said: Bob Avakian’s theorizing is an internally coherent synthesis and it is in command. The flaws that now mark the RCP’s work fundamentally arise from Avakian’s synthesis itself, from the methods and thinking it unleashes, not from somewhere else.

The RCP does not have a correct appraisal of the objective situation. It does not apply the mass line correctly. [12] It has not developed the correct tactics and strategy for the revolutionary process in this country. These are profound shortcomings for any party. And they are tied to shortcomings in method and approach that are concentrated within Avakian’s developing synthesis.

The flaws in the RCP’s current work arise from Avakian’s synthesis, not from somewhere else.

People often ask “What is this new synthesis?” They find it hard to pin down when confronted with Avakian’s loosely-woven body of work. [13]

For the purposes of these letters, I will break this synthesis down into a number of main areas:

• The RCP asserts that the “emergence” of a “unique, special and irreplaceable leader” of a “special caliber” has implications for everything communists and the masses of people do in the world today. This theory of great leaders justifies a number of other major programmatic and strategic shifts — especially moving the “promotion and popularization” of Avakian to the heart of the party’s work.

• There is a claim to seek and uphold truth in an entirely new way. This is called “Avakian’s epistemological rupture” [14] with previous communist thinking.

• There is a new “envisioning” of the socialist transition to communism — with a special stress on holding firmly onto power while creating the conditions for mass debate over major challenges facing the continuing revolution. There is an assertion that this new re-conception of the communist road should take center stage in political discussions now — both among communists and broadly among the masses.

• This synthesis is viewed as a world-historic re-conception of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). Avakian and his work is specifically compared and equated to the contributions Lenin and Mao made to communist theory. It is said that the masses worldwide must pass through the doorway that Bob Avakian has opened for the way out. And this leap in Marxism is said to be arising from Avakian’s summations of the whole previous history of communist revolution, not mainly from an application of MLM to the practice of making revolution in the U.S.

There are other components to Avakian’s synthesis which will need excavation at another time, including Avakian’s particular view of communist revolution as a world process, an idiosyncratic critique of democracy, and the RCP’s spiral/conjunctural theory of capitalist crisis. [15]

In the letters that follow, I will make some initial critiques — sometimes in detail, sometimes by indicating a line of thought. Many problems I unravel have been noted over years by others coming from their own diverse politics.

These letters can’t (and won’t) offer a tidy counter-synthesis to Avakian’s synthesis. That is because we are at the beginning, not the end, of our “very presumptuous work.” However woven into these letters will be thoughts about a different path that I believe serious revolutionaries need to take.

I hope this critical exploration will help gather now-dispersed forces for all that we need to bring into being.

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Notes

[2] Charles Darwin’s Letter to J. D. Hooker, January 11, 1844

[3] Niles Eldredge, Darwin – Discovering the Tree of Life, W.W. Norton, 2005

[4] There are, at this moment at least three “packages” making claims to some universal (i.e. global) applicability: Gonzalo Thought of the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path), Prachanda Path of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Avakian’s New Synthesis. Other major Maoist parties, like the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines have their own distinctive analyses and approaches. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has taken initiatives to regroup the international communist movement on a new basis. (Worker 11 p.35)

[5] The public theoretical work of Bob Avakian, particularly his work since the mid 1990s can generally be found on two web pages: revcom.us/avakian/ and bobavakian.net .

[6] Reductionism is an analytical method that incorrectly boils down complex processes to just one or two determining factors. RCP’s self-criticism for previous reductionism appears in Notes on Political Economy – Our analysis of the 1980s, Issues of Methodology, and the Current World Situation, RCP Publications, 2000, revcom.us/a/special_postings/poltoc_e.htm

[7] Inevitabilism refers to an assumption that end results in nature and society are inevitable given the nature of defining contradictions and processes. It is particularly associated with the oft-stated view within communist theory that communism is the inevitable outcome of the contradictions of class society. It is also refers to a tendency to overestimate the objective limits and inflexibility of capitalism, and therefore to overestimate the degree to which the existing system cannot offer “a way out.” RCP criticism of inevitabilism appears in “Views on Socialism and Communism: A Radically New Kind Of State, A Radically Different And Far Greater Vision Of Freedom.” revcom.us

[8] One well-known example of reductionism was the RCP’s insistence for many years that same sex orientation was a personal ideological decision. A prominent error of both reductionism and inevitabilism was the RCP’s fervent insistence that a nuclear world war was inevitable in the 1980s unless there was revolution “in large and/or strategic parts of the world.”

[9] Bob Avakian, The Coming Civil War and Repolarization for Revolution in the Present Era, 2005, revcom.us

[10] “By ‘instrumentalism’ here I mean torturing reality in the attempt to make a distorted version of reality an instrument of certain aims.” (Avakian, Bringing Forward Another Way, 2006, revcom.us)

To the RCP, instrumentalism means slanting and crafting ideas to serve political purposes in a manipulative or self-deceptive way.

[11] After initially supporting the Maoist revolution in Nepal, the RCP has stopped most references to that struggle and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). There has been virtually no public work building support for the revolution in Nepal against ongoing U.S. intervention. This is rooted in disputes over line and strategy – over the Nepali communist view of Avakian, their views on democracy and their temporary decision to enter Nepal’s government. Quite a few of Avakian’s recent writings can be read as polemics against the CPN(M)’s Prachanda Path. Even if things were to change and that silence were to finally end, there is a method exposed here that needs a critical look: The assumption is that the RCP can judge the zigs-and-zags of a party confronting complex transitions to power, based essentially on general principles and textual analysis from afar. This reveals a debilitating dogmatism rooted in the denigration of practice that runs through Avakian’s synthesis.

[12] The definition from the RCP’s Draft Programme:

“The mass line is the method through which the party both learns from and leads the masses. To apply the mass line means to seek out and learn from the ideas of the masses and to apply the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to concentrate what is correct in these ideas, distilling and synthesizing them into a more all-sided and correct reflection of reality and what must be done to change it. The party then takes this back to the masses in the form of line and policies, works to win the people to take these up, and unites with the masses to carry them out — summing up the results and then repeating the process. The mass line is an ongoing process which links theory with practice and the vanguard with the masses in an ever-deepening way all in the service of the masses’ fundamental revolutionary interests.” (2001, revcom.us)

This program has not been publicly adopted by the RCP and it is unclear which draft formulations are still being upheld.

[13] Avakian recently gave a one-sentence capsule of his new synthesis. Here it is:

“This new synthesis involves a recasting and recombining of the positive aspects of the experience so far of the communist movement and of socialist society, while learning from the negative aspects of this experience, in the philosophical and ideological as well as the political dimensions, so as to have a more deeply and firmly rooted scientific orientation, method and approach with regard not only to making revolution and seizing power but then, yes, to meeting the material requirements of society and the needs of the masses of people, in an increasingly expanding way, in socialist society — overcoming the deep scars of the past and continuing the revolutionary transformation of society, while at the same time actively supporting the world revolutionary struggle and acting on the recognition that the world arena and the world struggle are most fundamental and important, in an overall sense — together with opening up qualitatively more space to give expression to the intellectual and cultural needs of the people, broadly understood, and enabling a more diverse and rich process of exploration and experimentation in the realms of science, art and culture, and intellectual life overall, with increasing scope for the contention of different ideas and schools of thought and for individual initiative and creativity and protection of individual rights, including space for individuals to interact in ‘civil society’ independently of the state — all within an overall cooperative and collective framework and at the same time as state power is maintained and further developed as a revolutionary state power serving the interests of the proletarian revolution, in the particular country and worldwide, with this state being the leading and central element in the economy and in the overall direction of society, while the state itself is being continually transformed into something radically different from all previous states, as a crucial part of the advance toward the eventual abolition of the state with the achievement of communism on a world scale.” Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity, Part 1: Beyond The Narrow Horizon Of Bourgeois Right, 2007, revcom.us

[14] Epistemology is the study of how human beings come to know reality – answering Mao’s question “where do correct ideas come from?”

[15] See Notes on Political Economy – Our analysis of the 1980s, Issues of Methodology, and the Current World Situation, revcom.us

Next letter…

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Published: December 2007
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