Nine Letters to Our Comrades

Letter 4: Truth, Practice and a Confession of Poverty

by Mike Ely

“From the time of Conquer the World [38] [CTW], I have been bringing forward an epistemological rupture with a lot of the history of the ICM [International Communist Movement], including China and the GPCR [Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution], which had this thing arguing that there is such a thing as proletarian truth and bourgeois truth — this was in a major circular put out by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In some polemics we wrote around the coup in China, we uncritically echoed this. Later on, we criticized ourselves for that. This rupture actually began with CTW. CTW was an epistemological break — we have to go for the truth, rather than hiding things, etc. — a whole approach of interrogating our whole history. That’s why it was taken as a breath of fresh air by some, while other people hated it, saying it reduced the history of the international communist movement and our banner of communism to a ‘tattered flag’ — which was not the point at all.”

Bob Avakian, 2004 [39]

“The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, ‘Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.’”

Mao Tsetung, 1937 [40]

There are major philosophical questions of truth and reality that communists urgently need to take up. Avakian sniffs at some of them and papers over others.

This is not the place to give these larger questions the depth and freshness they deserve. And I am not the writer to draw those threads together. That must be one of our collective projects-to-come. The best I can offer are the following tentative thoughts on Avakian’s philosophical claims.

A Thought Experiment

Step into a room full of geologists or working philosophers, and announce “Our leader Bob Avakian has made a major epistemological break. He says we have to go for the truth, rather than hiding things.”

Would anyone be impressed?

The need for an honest pursuit of truth is pretty old news to most thinking people. So is Avakian’s other argument that we should engage the arguments of opponents and independent thinkers in depth — with an intention of learning from them in the course of our own work. [41]

When Louis Althusser first analyzed Marx’s epistemological break, he compared this leap in historical understanding to the breaks made by Galileo in physics, Lavoisier in chemistry, Darwin and Mendel in biology and so on. [42] Each of these breaks with medieval idealism split society’s thinking into before-and-after — and that philosophical and scientific process, of pioneering a materialist struggle for truth, is now hundreds of years old.

Avakian’s epistemological rupture is far more limited. It is conceived only as a “rupture with a lot of the history of the whole ICM.” And in that narrow framework, it has value. We should be fans of Conquer the World. It opened doors toward a materialist examination of the history of communism by communists.

But this attempted rupture within MLM is hardly a breath-taking innovation for how larger society thinks. It is really a very late plea for Maoism to race to catch up with a basic scientific approach to truth that is casually assumed in many spheres of investigation.

Avakian’s break is actually banal wherever serious research and debate goes on — i.e., wherever thinking is not dominated by religious dogma, the lying of politicians, or the bully habits of paid hacks. The fact that his defense of truth may be shocking and disquieting among Maoists is not proof of its profundity. It is (unfortunately) a confession of the poverty within that Maoist movement.

There is real glory and continuing value to Maoism, as a body of thought and as a movement for liberation. As a distinct international trend, it was born during the 1960s in raging opposition to both the global rampages of the U.S. and the suffocating gray norms of the Soviet Union. Maoism proclaimed “It is right to rebel against reactionaries,” and gave new life to the revolutionary dream. It said “Serve the People,” and promised that no one (not even the communist vanguard) would be above the interrogations of the people. A loose global current congealed from many eclectic streams, and it included many of the world’s most serious revolutionaries. There have been important and heroic attempts at power — in Turkey, Iran, India, the Philippines, Peru, Nepal and more. There were important revolutionary movements of 1968 that included Maoists in France, Germany, Italy and more. There was real ferment around the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and then at times around the RCP in the U.S.

But since Mao died in 1976, this Maoist movement has not been a fertile nursery of daring analyses and concepts. A mud streak has run through it. Even its best forces often cling to legitimizing orthodoxies, icons, and formulations. The popularization of largely-correct verdicts often replaces the high road of scientific theory — allowing Marxism itself to appear pat, simple and complete. Dogmatic thinking nurtures both self-delusion and triumphalism. In the name of taking established truths to the people, revolutionary communists have often cut themselves off from the new facts and creative thinking of our times.

We need to break with that fiercely, and seek out the others who agree.

Revolutionary communists have often cut themselves off from the new facts and creative thinking of our times.

In a cloistered universe, Avakian’s ruptures in inherited ideologies can appear as a radical break. But measured by our tasks, it hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

The issue facing our movement is not so much “are we for truth?” The issue is much more “what is true and what isn’t?” It involves the problem of bridging the limited and prejudiced vantage point of each observer, and collectively getting into what is real. It is the measure of theories, established verdicts and relative truths against objective truth.

A Denigration of Practice

In Avakian’s hands, theory is teased far away from practice. [43] And the result of this methodological denigration of practice is (ultimately) new strains of subjective idealism. [44]

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach starts by making exactly this point: “The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively.”

A persistent example of this denigration of practice is the marked dilettantism of Avakian’s analysis. Avakian is an innovative and provocative thinker, but his expositions are often brainstorms masquerading as science. They often involve his commentary on a bookshelf of popular commentators and typically use a revealing quote or sometimes a close textual read of those commentators as a substitute for real research. This is fine for agitation and public argumentation. It is fine for running out preliminary ideas and tentative hypotheses. However it is not sufficient for creation and confirmation of the underlying analysis itself. The necessary research (and general summation of practice) does not need to be visible. It can be done by others testing preliminary theses. But it does need to exist and it does need to be done in a critical (and even skeptical) spirit. [45]

Brainstorms masquerading as science.

Avakian argues for “doing the work” of serious research and engagement with others. He denounces complacency and “the moronization” of his own followers. Here, as in so many places, his own break is incomplete. The model he demonstrates continues the old problems in new idiosyncratic forms.

Take, for example, the RCP’s conclusion that there is a concerted rush toward fascist theocracy that is threatening a deep social schism (even perhaps literally “civil war”) between thinking people and theocrats within the U.S. Go look at the limited and fragmentary work which underlies that claim — not just underlying the public argumentation, but the analysis itself.

Another example: Everyone knows that understanding capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union is important. But how can a movement claim to have a real analysis of those events without working up a credible materialist history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s? How is it possible to assess the Stalin years (with all their complexity, heroism and horror) without having any real analysis of the struggles of the 1930s, including the events called “the purges” [46] in the late thirties? And how can a party claim to “Set the Record Straight” if it makes no effort to learn from the new scholarship and argumentation based on the mountains of information contained in the now-opened Soviet archives? How can we more deeply sum up either the revolution or the counter-revolution in China without a credible materialist history of major events like the Great Leap Forward or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?

Research doesn’t need to be visible. But it does need to exist.

When Avakian suggests taking a new look at the GPCR, he means retooling past summations in light of his new theoretical conclusions. There has been very little serious revisiting the actual events and problems in light of new debates and new information. [47]

Avakian exhibits a great precision of formulation but a real lack of rigor in research compared to most serious intellectual work conducted outside his movement. [48]

Hyping the objectivity of relative truths

Dogmatism among communists willfully ignores objective reality and its complexity. That is a problem Avakian calls out. Dogmatism among communists also exaggerates the objective nature of relative truth. That is a problem Avakian aggressively perpetuates (in the name of fighting relativism). [49]

There is objective truth meaning truth that objectively exists — i.e., that corresponds to reality independent of the thoughts of humans. For example it is objectively true that the earth revolves around the sun, and this was objectively true for billions of years before any humans subjectively realized it was true. It was even objectively true before there were humans.

But our ideas emerge from “individual human beings with their extremely limited thought.” [50] The truth is not just “out there” like a ripened fruit waiting to be plucked and delivered whole. What we have available to us are relative truths, which only approximate absolute truth through protracted collective work, where humans develop theories, test and refine them.

In a recent piece, Avakian quotes Mao’s On Practice:

“Marxists recognize that in the absolute and general process of the development of the universe, the development of each particular process is relative, and that hence, in the endless flow of absolute truth, man’s knowledge of a particular process at any given stage of development is only relative truth.”

Right after quoting this, Avakian adds: “It is relative truth, but it is truth.” [51]

Avakian acknowledges the existence of relative truth, but his addition here pooh-poohs Mao’s point. And it deliberately downplays all the ways relative truth divides into two — into both truth and falsehood. The relationships between our relative truths and reality are dynamic, contradictory and often painfully tenuous.

Relativism incorrectly asserts that humans are unable to distinguish between true and false, progressive and reactionary. Materialist dialectics however insists that we can, through work and struggle, determine true things about reality, but that the truths we uncover remain inherently partial and relative compared to the full and absolute truth about objective reality. If we really grasp that, we see the importance of constantly identifying errors and contradictions in our current thinking.

Passionate defense of objective truth becomes the front-end for overstating the correctness of flawed theories.

The inherent contradictions of relative truth are the reason communists need to place great importance on critical thinking, collective vetting, public self-interrogation and the application of the mass line. It takes a great deal of collective struggle and practice to advance human knowledge through the necessary spirals from lower to higher, from somewhat correct to more correct.

The RCP advocates returning complexity to communist analysis, but then, all too often leaches complexity from its own discussion. Here, the real, nagging, structural problems and controversies surrounding the development of correct understandings are minimized. With Avakian’s method and approach, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth are pancaked flat, producing a simplified set of ideological assertions.

Put another way: The actual thing, the perception of that thing, the latest conception arising from perceptions, and the latest presentation of that concept are effectively muddled. [52]

It creates a situation where the RCP can give lip service to critical thinking and yet promote a logic of close-minded zealotry.

At the end, a passionate-sounding defense of objective truth becomes the front-end for overstating the correctness of Avakian’s own current, partial and often flawed set of working assumptions. Supporters of the RCP typically end up promoting a reductionist package: (1) There is the truth, (2) it corresponds to objective reality and (3) “Avakian knows the way out.”

About the Class Struggle Over Truth

Avakian describes how he views truth entering the class struggle:

“…so long as society is divided into classes, anything that is learned will become part of the class struggle in many different ways… The truth doesn’t have a social content in that sense. It just objectively exists. But knowing the truth (or approximating the truth) is important in the same way beauty is important (even while people’s differing class viewpoints will lead them to have different conceptions, or notions, about what beauty is and what is and is not beautiful). And there is this process, as I was speaking to earlier — how truths enter into the class struggle in a very non-reductionist way.” [53]

Let’s deal with how this describes the way truths “enter into the class struggle.”

This view underestimates the ways class struggle is involved in how relative truth is learned. Truth doesn’t suddenly “enter” the class struggle — because we discover truth through a social process, our knowledge of truth never exists in a realm unmarked by class struggle. Avakian’s comments display a lack of appreciation (actually a denial) of the problem of observer (and of human observers’ inherent limitations and subjectivities).

The real existing social process of uncovering and refining relative truths does not start with a classless inventory of data or a classless connecting of dots to make concepts. There is not a moment when we all watch those new truths cruise into the choppy waters of social controversy.

Complex truths (and in particular complex social truths) are marked by struggle at each point in their existence: including in their whole process of conception and elaboration, in their struggle for acceptance, in the ways they are popularized, in the way their social implications are portrayed, and in the struggle over their eventual replacement by newer and more correct concepts. And such struggle — which takes philosophical, ideological and political forms — is inherently entwined with the larger class struggle raging over the direction and nature of society itself.

I can think of three ways Avakian’s error manifests itself:

First, there is the marked lack of appreciation by Avakian of his own subjective limitations and of the relative nature of his attempts at truth.

Second, there is a one-sided overestimation by the RCP of the degree to which scientific work in bourgeois society spontaneously approximates materialist dialectics. [54] The RCP has downplayed the differences that separate materialist dialectics from the many shades of positivism and empiricism in modern science. This overestimation of spontaneous materialist dialectics has both political and philosophical implications for the RCP — especially given the new strategic prominence the RCP now gives those strata who “work with ideas.” [55]

A third manifestation is Avakian’s rejection of “class truth.” Some of this is hard to unravel since Avakian’s sketchy polemics treat the concepts of “class truth,” “political truth” and “truth as an organizing principle”– as virtually equivalent, and implies that they all imply a denial (or deceitful ignoring) of objective reality. Avakian makes no critical references to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiro-Criticism or Mao’s On Practice or Engels’ Anti-Duhring — so we are left without any clear sense of what, precisely, his break is.

However, in fact, the communist notion of class truth is not “whatever we believe is true, whatever the bourgeoisie believes is not.” Nor is it “we create our reality by declaring our truths, while the bourgeoisie creates its reality through its truths.” Nor is it “whatever serves our cause is true, whatever doesn’t serve our cause should be treated as untrue.”

Avakian criticizes the May 16th circular, which was an opening shot of the GPCR. It says:

“Just when we began the counter-offensive against the wild attacks of the bourgeoisie, the authors of the Report raised the slogan: ‘Everyone is equal before the truth.’ This is a bourgeois slogan. Completely negating the class nature of truth, they use this slogan to protect the bourgeoisie and oppose the proletariat, oppose Marxism-Leninism and oppose Mao Tsetung Thought.” [56]

An article from Peking Review’s revolutionary days writes,

“Truth has a class character. There have never been truths commonly regarded as ‘indisputable’ by all classes in the field of social science.” [57]

Why is that wrong?

Is Lenin so wrong when he writes,

“It is one of our basic tasks to contrapose our own truth to bourgeois ‘truth,’ and win its recognition.” [58]

Or Alain Badiou, when he writes,

“Ultimately, we should affirm that the same abstract description of facts by no means leads to the same mode of thinking, when it operates under different political axioms.” [59]

On the Re-Envisioning of Socialist Transition

All of these philosophical problems bubble up in Avakian’s re-envisioning of socialism and communism — the underestimation of practice, the overestimation of the objective character of tentative theories, a dilettantism of historical summation, and the underestimation of class struggle in the fight for truth. There is a lot of assertion about the future with little appreciation of the ways that unanticipated particularities in the future will necessarily shape possibilities and policy. And again, much of this is hard to pin down because of the sketchiness of Avakian’s presentation and the incomplete articulation of his break with Mao. All this will need a more extensive exploration in its own right.

However, for now: the struggle to advance to communism is presented (by Avakian) as a highly ideological process, where intellectual contestations over truth and the allowing of debate (important though those two things are) one-sidedly overshadow the need for waves of mass struggle against old ways, old ideas and capitalist roaders in high places. And once again, Avakian does not correctly understand how the needed transformations of world outlook (among the masses generally) are connected to that class struggle.

Avakian raises the importance of holding onto revolutionary power firmly, while risking a lot to allow space for ferment, criticism and debate. [60] His is a model of a state with key power levers (army, top courts, foreign policy) firmly in the hands of a single vanguard party that simultaneously encourages “vibrant debate and dissent.” Avakian raises a whole subsidiary set of issues regarding the rule of law under socialism, contested elections and the ruling party’s approach to criticisms. He starts a needed polemic against the way that the communist movement has often viewed intellectuals (and really anyone who thinks) as “problem people.” He questions the naive notion that the problems of previous socialism can be solved by institutionalizing more democracy of various kinds. [61] And Avakian explores the historic problem of enabling the masses of people to become (more and more) a decisive part of the “we” that rules during the socialist transition period.

To all of this one can say: So far so good. Virtually everyone recognizes that a major dilemma of earlier socialism was that there was a waning of political liveliness and popular support, and a difficulty rallying mass revolutionary activity for new advances toward communism.

But if we are going to deal with all this, let’s get real as well as “visionary.”

Once again, important questions are raised, and interesting tentative conclusions are put forward — that deserve more critical examination than are allowed around his party.

Avakian’s denigration of practice appears here in at least three ways:

First, there is an overestimation of how fully the theoretical problems of transition can be solved isolated from new practice in seizing, holding and wielding state power. It defies the insights of materialist dialectics (and of communist epistemology) to think anyone can make an overarching new “re-envisioning” solely by mulling over the bones of past revolutions, or that the nagging world historic problems of socialist transition can be pre-solved in some definitive and decisive way.

Mao started developing a critique of Stalin’s socialism quite early in his revolution. He fought to forge a new path (starting with the “Yenan Way” before victory, and then increasingly after coming to power in 1949). But his transition from critique to a new developed-and-developing synthesis required the practical experiences of actually building socialism (including both victories and failures): land reform, implementation of the Soviet industrialization model, the Great Leap Forward, Socialist Education campaigns, and then the GPCR.

Think of the living process, methodology and epistemology concentrated in Mao’s famous remark:

“In the past we waged struggles in rural areas, in factories, in the cultural field, and we carried out the socialist education movement. But all this failed to solve the problem because we did not find a form, a method, to arouse the broad masses to expose our dark aspect openly, in an all-round way and from below.” [62]

Mao’s theoretical understanding of socialism and his alternative road developed in the course of those storms of class struggle — in the practice of China taking the socialist road and the Soviet Union taking the capitalist road. Mao’s breakthroughs could only have been developed that way. History has given us many critiques of Stalin’s socialism — but Mao’s is unique in its profundity and materialism in part because it is rooted in (and extracted from) the vast practice of our second great revolution.

New theoretical solutions require a deep summation of the past — but also the living practice of actually going through the transition anew (with all the real testing, new errors, and new innovations that this makes possible).

The RCP has always leaned too far in its assumptions of what can be known apart from practice. Two cautionary examples are its past declarations that homosexuality would be “eliminated” under socialism, and its current declarations that it can know (from afar) which transitions to power are possible in Nepal and which are not. The whole elaborate structure of future society that Avakian has constructed in his mind is a creation and culmination of that mistaken methodology.

Second, there is an overestimation of how much the nagging practical problems of socialist transition can be solved now, ahead of time. It is as if adopting Avakian’s approaches like “solid core with a lot of elasticity” now is crucial (for all communists worldwide) to avoid the previous dynamics that plagued socialism in China and the USSR. In fact many stubborn problems of the actual transition to communism and the material basis for solving them emerge from the actual class struggle (from the practice!) of the particular socialist transition, and can’t simply be solved ahead of time.

Certainly the future revolutionary movement must adopt far better methods of learning from and working with people than communists (including the RCP) have historically employed. And yes, improvements now in the grasp of mass line can greatly improve the capacity and nature of that movement which ultimately seizes power.

But revolutions a