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| Tikapur, Nepal, Photo: TMG (all rights reserved) |
Nine Letters to Our Comrades
Letter 9: Traveling Light, Coming from Within
by Mike Ely
“…if, owing to objective and subjective conditions, this party exists and carries on for 40 or 50 years like the CPUSA before it and never leads a revolution, what’s so great about that? Really why would it be so terrible if somebody got together and formed another party and tried to learn from the positive and negative and went ahead and tried to make revolution?”
Bob Avakian, 1982 [122]
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
From a song [123]
No overarching historical mechanism guarantees a revolutionary outcome. New things will ceaselessly and inevitably emerge — and either something radically liberating takes roots in society or it doesn’t. The implications for humanity are profound.
Mao said there is no need to inoculate ourselves from ideas. We must dare to go through things and come out the other side. [124] Maoists, following Mao in this, have to leave the comfort of reassuring illusions and misplaced authority. We have to confront that here in the U.S. we have neither a vanguard organization nor the theoretical breakthroughs we need.
The Maoist project centered on the RU/RCP never really “took off.” It never took root as a leading representative of the oppressed (other than in the most abstracted, self-defined sense). After grappling with this contradiction from many sides, this party’s leadership has now consolidated itself around a course that is a particularly sterile response to long-standing problems. This is concentrated in the adoption of “Avakian as the cardinal question.”
Throughout these letters I have been forced to repeat the words “real,” “actual,” and “living” — over and over — because so much of communist project here in the U.S. has been fantasy draped in fine words.
“The train has left the station”?
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Even if a turn of events pumped new life into old “vehicles” (including the RCP itself), the heart of the problem would remain untouched. Specific, voluntarist verdicts are fully consolidated at the heights of the RCP. When they say “the train has left the station” — they truly mean that the debate over those verdicts within that party is over. So be it.
Forging a way forward requires moving beyond all this, even as this party’s leadership presses ahead, white-knuckled, on the course it has set.
Meanwhile, five minutes out that door is a beautiful blue planet crammed with contradiction and life. The rush into the future does not hang by any single thread — but it does demand something of us. One way or another, something different has to raise its head. It is now left for revolutionary communists, both inside and outside the RCP, to re-conceive as we re-group.
This is not the place to actually make a positive accounting of “what we possess.” But we must start that soon. We need a process, a going, where we sort things through, think afresh and start to act, together.
When Mao’s Red Army abandoned their early base area, they carried with them all the hard-won apparatus of rebel state power: they brought archives, printing presses, factory equipment, rolls of telephone wire, furniture and more. That baggage cost them dearly in lives, when the heavily burdened column faced its first tests of fire. They then simply left off the boxes and machinery of their old apparatus. What they kept was that material that made sense when integrated into their new mode of existence. They were traveling light. They were ready to improvise, live off the land, and fight.
The analogy to our theoretical moment: We need to discard ruthlessly, but cunningly, in order to fight under difficult conditions. We will be traveling light, without baggage and clutter from earlier modes of existence. We need to preserve precisely those implements that serve the advance, against fierce opposition, toward our end goal. We need to integrate them into a vibrant new communist coherency — as we thrive on the run.
Not a remake of the RCP. |
It is a great creative challenge. We don’t need a remake of the RCP, but better. The theoretical knife must cut deeper than that. There needs to be negation, affirmation, and then a real leap beyond what has gone before. We need a movement of all-the-way revolutionaries that lives in this 21st century. Not some reshuffling of old cadre, but the beginning reshuffling of a whole society.
We need to take up a great new project of practice — while applying and developing our theory.
I can propose two or three key places to start new practical work together. And I see at least four major problems for theoretical engagement:
First, we need to chart the uncharted course, sum up past practice and move to actually fuse revolutionary communism with the deep currents of discontent among the oppressed.
Second, communist theory needs to deeply comprehend our world today — the new connectedness of production and communications, the global shifts of industry, the mass migrations of people, the changes in class structures, the dynamics of modern warfare, the capitalist transformation of remaining feudal relations, the new interpenetrations and conflicts of imperialist powers, the basis and limitations shaping the unprecedented attempt to establish a global U.S. hegemony, the development of political Islam, and the stark historically-new ways the emancipation of women is posed. These changes (and more) are driving a world process quite different from the one explored in earlier communist analysis. There are related analyses of the U.S. itself that are needed, including deepening understanding of the impact of “de-industrialization” of the working class, and changes in the structures of national oppression (i.e., racist oppression of minority people in the U.S.).
We are at a fresh start. |
Third, communist theory needs to comprehend the twentieth century — especially what that century revealed about the socialist transition to communism and the wellsprings of capitalist restoration. When encountering communists, people all over the world demand to know what we have learned from this exhilarating and painful process and what we would now do differently. Our answer must come in deep historical analysis and theoretical proposals — but also in our style, our methods, our program and our larger practice.
Fourth, communist theory needs to clean its Augean stables [125] — uprooting this legacy of dogmatism, deepening its struggle against various forms of capitulation, and tackling long-standing philosophical and strategic problems that stand as real obstacles to communist revolution.
Discussing their history, the Maoists of Nepal touched on outlook. They made their mental leap toward the seizure of power, “by protecting revolution from the revolutionary phrases that we used to memorize in the early period.” And they say that then, later, they dared “to abandon the course once selected and have the courage to climb the unexplored mountain.” [126]
Something important is being said if our movement in the U.S. can (at long last) develop an ability to even hear the voices of others. We have to learn to look past the text, the glib phrase, the comforting myth — and look deeply into the living thing and our living practice of engagement. We have to actually know this shimmering, dancing world in the course of actually fighting to end its many horrors.
We are in many ways at a fresh start. Let’s re-teach ourselves to think with a critical spirit. Let’s struggle and debate creatively, as comrades. Let’s chart that uncharted course. Let’s actually “prepare minds and organize forces for revolution.” Let’s bring down the beast and move toward the final emancipation of humanity.
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Notes
[122] “A Party is Not a Holy Thing – It’s Got to be A Vanguard,” published as a chapter in If There is to be Revolution, There Must be a Revolutionary Party, RCP Publications, June 1982
[123] During the Pittston coal strike in 1989, I came upon a small circle of religious radicals singing these stirring words in the middle of a tense scene.
[124] Conversations With Wang Hai-jung, December 21, 1970, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. IX, marxists.org. Mao is talking to his niece about how to approach classic works of China’s feudal past.
[125] One of the “impossible” tasks that Hercules accomplished in Greek mythology was cleaning the vast Augean stables in a single day by diverting rivers to wash away long-accumulated muck.
[126] We don’t need to have verdicts on their particular “unexplored mountain” in order to appreciate their larger methodological point. Maoist Information Bulletin 17, July 2007, cpnm.org
Published: December 2007
Available online at mikeely.wordpress.com
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Who links to me?
December 31, 2007 at 9:37 am
In many ways this final letter is the most important one, I think, for those of us here who do not come out of the RCP. It imagines a real new beginning. The question, of course, that it poses is “precisely how light do you intend to travel?”
I don’t think we should make a fetish of labels, but the question hanging here is whether what is envisioned here will still think of itself as “Maoist.” While clearly this group of folks owes much of their political training (both bad and good) to Maoism, and while I think there are important internationalist responsibilities to the Maoist-led revolutionary movements in Nepal and India, it seems much less clear to me that this label does useful work for us here in the US (or in the rest of the advanced industrialized world).
There are people grappling with the same questions posed in these letters who come from a wide range of radical and revolutionary left currents and it seems to me that the critical thing to do is to engage them and not throw up obstacles to such engagement. If Maoism is dividing into two, three, many Maoisms it seems that the important thing to take from it/them is not the label rather what is most useful. To my mind the clearest items of value in this inventory are teh theory of the mass line and the understanding of the continuation of class struggle under socialism, but even here we should be aware of how other current have given different names to similar insights and strive to bring these different perspectives into conversation with each other.
January 5, 2008 at 8:39 am
a great line from letter 8 I think:
“Mao did not declare his own words ‘historic.’ He actually made history.”
yeah, ok, it made me laugh at bob’s expense, but it was a well placed paragraph!
What I really want to know is how the hell did this happen? I mean really.
I have been staying at arms length and sometimes further for 20 years. Some of the problems were evident even back then, like discouraging study, most especially of things that the party didn’t write. Back then, I had found the way they promoted themselves as being the strongest on the left re: the oppression of women to be very attractive. It was heartbreakingly not true. There’s some hinting at them being puritanical about sexuality in general in the letters in the discussions about the rcp’s stances on homosexuality. I think the fact that their approach to sexuality should be questioned also points to a need to question this supposedly excellent line regarding women and I think it’s yet another area where good criticism and definitely new analysis would help with our forward motion.
But when I left, they would never have lowered themselves to such obvious ridiculousness especially with this cult of the individual crap. By the time I finished this last letter here, I could hardly believe how bad its gotten.
How did that happen?
I have had this rudimentary summation in my head about how back in the days of trying to stop a nuclear 3rd world war really kind of put us all in this frantic spin and the idea of taking the time to pay attention to mass line and how cadre were doing was just too much. I think things got rather warped that way and pushed them into some pragmatism and began this whole volunteerism thing they have been into seemingly ever since.
Incidentally, I also remember days before then when the true beauty of communist vision just beamed in their work and in the interactions of cadre. the people around the RCP kept their optimism for a lot longer than most of the revolutionaries of the 60’s & 70’s. I feel fortunate to have been exposed to that.
I guess if you’ve switched over to hating on the masses and need to give a “simple” version of things (sounds like straight up economism to me), then you might as well get on the religious band wagon of the supposed theocratic takeover and give them their condescending savior.
I just don’t understand how these very same people could justify themselves.
Recently, I went to an event and spoke “casually” with some folks - some folks who, in light of my relatively minimal reading over the years, should be practically encyclopedic in comparison - and really tried hard to get them to explain to me what was new about this synthesis, because it would be really nice if I had a party to belong to again and because they kept trying to tell me I might actually like them better now, and these people were not able to address my more “classical” less “synthesized” view & memory of MLM. They couldn’t distinguish anything new from what I remembered of MLM 101 AND they kept calling bob the next Darwin based on it. It blew my mind, really.
If I can remember that blind faith and blaming the masses, does not a communist revolution make, how come they can’t? what the hell happened? What ARE they actually trying to accomplish as an organization now? Is someone getting some kind of personal gain? Is everyone just clinging to what they feel is the only revolutionary hope? As I read the letters, it sounds absurd to me from my vantage point, but I know, like everything, it really didn’t come from nowhere. whatever bug bit them in the ass, I really want to inoculate us all against.
I want to pull back the curtain and look upon the great “oz”.
There’s so much to hash out, y’all!
Happy New Year!
la lucha sigue
January 5, 2008 at 9:29 am
Treacherousbringht, in asking “How did that happen?” I think you’re asking, “How did sincere revolutionary communists (or people who see themselves as such) wind up as members of a quasi-religious cult centering upon a man whose teachings (which they cannot themselves even articulately summarize those they simply refer you to his books, “talks,” and tapes) are supposed to provide the answers?
What was going through members’ minds in 1995 when they passed the “Resolution on leadership”? Or made selling Bob’s autobiography their main thing?
I wonder how many rank and file members ever wonder what Bob did for a quarter century in France. Why are only 6 pages in his 446 page autobiography devoted to his “exile”? The man was born in 1943, left for France in 1981 and apparently returned only in 2006. He writes about “leading from exile.” Do party members and supporters wonder what he was doing from age 38 to 63? Of course everyone appreciates the need for security and secrecy. But does it not seem odd that someone unable to engage in mass work nevertheless acquires the wisdom necessary to lead the U.S. (and world) to liberation?
Bob is now depicted primarily as a great sage, a teacher, and a party member can do nothing more useful to the revolutionary cause than to convince others to “engage” Bob Avakian and devote many hours of time listening to videos that while interesting offer no breakthroughs (epistemological or otherwise). As Mike has shown, the party’s objective is to propel Bob into the superstructure, which I take it means television appearances, invitations to speak on campuses, etc., anticipating that once the masses can hear him speak, they will rise to his call. The campaign around the Engage! statement is one effort to enhance his reputation as a thinker who deserves to be heard.
How did this (personality cult) happen? It looks to me as though BA and the party, having despite some real (including recent) accomplishments failed to acquire a real social base, are opting in frustration for a very risky strategy. Since the party has failed to make breakthroughs (and Avakian might claim that failure is due to their failure to adequately implement his instructions given during his 25 years in France), they must now rely on him to personally speak to the American people.
They must sacrifice their time, in which they could be reading theory, or history, or occassionally mellowing out, and be kept in a constant state of tense effort leaving little opportunity for reflection. This is how cults work, and I think not coincidentally Avakian has been spending a lot of time thinking about religion.
January 6, 2008 at 1:12 am
pavel, yeah, in part I’m asking that about “sincere revolutionary communists” but more, I want a good historical study of their trajectory to help unearth their line(s) so we can proceed with that caution - kinda like asking, “how did all those people “just let” Hitler do that?” there were processes. something led them that way.
January 6, 2008 at 1:15 am
oops. wasn’t done….
and its not really about sincerity as much as how obviously contrary to mlm they are acting right now. how do they reconcile for that or do they even bother trying? or something like that….
January 6, 2008 at 11:05 am
Treacherousbright, I think you raise an important question: how did the RCP become the weird, cultish and irrelevant sect that it is despite the fact that many of those who are (or have been) involved genuinely want(ed) to change the world for the better?
This points to something that I find truly sad about Mike’s “letters”: he is trying to answer this question through terms and ideas derived principally from Bob Avakian’s writings (hence all the quotes). Though I can understand how this might help him extricate himself from the group–and, for that, I’m happy–his method also shows the extent to which he’s still trapped within the twisted universe that is the RCP. It’s like watching a Branch Davidian cite David Koresh’s sermons in order to explain the Waco catastrophe: it might potentially yield an insight or two, but the method presupposes a vocabulary and a series of premises that are fundamentally non-sensical and indefensible.
Mike, you grant a degree of intellectual authority to Avakian that absolutely no one outside of the RCP concedes and that has no relationship to his real world accomplishments. Avakian is not an intellectual and he is not a theorist and he is not a leader. I’m sorry that you ever believed otherwise: clearly the RCP’s has the ability to draw confused, idealist people into its vortex.
So, how did the RCP become what it is? That’s obviously a big question, but I would argue, as a point of departure, that it’s cultish, nutty qualities exist in direct proportion to its political irrelevance. In other words, the more nutty it is, the more irrelevant it becomes and the more the irrelevant it is, the more nutty it must become.
I would also encourage people to check out On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left by Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth. It’s a decent book, in my view, with some germane material.
January 6, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Chuck,
The other day on this site you asked for some to put forth what they thought were some of the RCP’s accomplishments. After Pavel and I responsed to you thanked us. Since I assume your raising such a question was a form of acknoweledgement that you in fact know little about the RCP’s external political practice and accomplishments I find it hard to fathom how a few short days later you find it fair to call the a “weird, cultish and irrelevant sect.”
I have not read On the Edge and I am curious what organizations it studies. Mind you I am not suggesting that the RCP, the anarchist scene or the catholic church dont “act like,” “display aspects of,” etc of being cult-like. But that doesnt I am claiming any of the above can be compared to the Branch Davidians. Sorry I won’t go there. And I challenge you to rethink this line of reasoning.
For one its a massive digression from the aims of this website. I am sorry but you need to really lay out a forceful and detailed arguement before you can start saying (Mike Ely) “which he’s still trapped within the twisted universe that is the RCP.” Please be a little more respectful of things you (as you’ve already acknowledged) know little about.
Two if we’re going to look at the RCP through the lens of cults why stop there. The politics of John Africa and Move? The weathermen? How about the anarchist scene? Or the Democratic Party?
You say, “nutty qualities exist in direct proportion to its political irrelevance. In other words, the more nutty it is, the more irrelevant it becomes and the more the irrelevant it is, the more nutty it must become.” PROVE IT. Cause right now, with the level of actual knowledge you have displayed of the EXTERNAL workings of the RCP, never mind the internal dynamics that you’d have to have (a) first hand experience of, or (b) have done serious research and interviews with many current and ex-members make your posts ring hollow.
And that’s my last point. Mike 9 letter’s whatever I may think of them are certainly a serious above board effort to engage the RCP and the revolutionary left on serious questions of political theory and strategy. If you really want to put forth such a line of argument on this website or elsewhere you have the responsibility to put in the work. do the research and make a through analysis of the RCP.
Sincerely, Saoirse
January 6, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Hi Saoirse,
Your post is unclear to me: do you object to something that I said about the RCP or simply to the fact that I said anything at all? If it’s the former, then where do we differ exactly? Spell it out … If it’s the latter, well, then, that’s your problem.
Are you mainly upset that I compared the RCP to the Branch Davidians? Analogies, as you should know, are never exact, but I do believe that the RCP has strong cultish qualities. Do you disagree with that?
I addressed a question posted by treacherousbright: how did the RCP become what it has become? Do you really