Letter 8: On the Cult of Personality: Revisiting Chen Boda’s Ghost
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Mao Tsetung, in base area
during the revolution.
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Nine Letters to Our Comrades
Letter 8: On the Cult of Personality: Revisiting Chen Boda’s Ghost
by Mike Ely
“Such is my aversion to all cult of personality that when I was plagued by repeated attempts to honor me publicly, coming from different countries at the time of the International, I never allowed any of them to break into the public sphere — nor did I ever reply to any of them, except with a snub here and there. When Engels and I first joined the underground Communist League, we demanded the removal of everything in the organization’s statutes that could have encouraged any superstitious awe of authority.”
Karl Marx, 1877 [109]
“Authority and prestige can be established only naturally through struggle and practice. They cannot be established artificially. Prestige established artificially will inevitably collapse.”
Mao Tsetung, 1967 [110]
“I remember, for example, being challenged by someone interviewing me — I believe this was on a college radio station in Madison, Wisconsin — who asked insistently: ‘Is there a “cult of personality” developing around Bob Avakian?’ And I replied: ‘I certainly hope so — we’ve been working very hard to create one.’”
Bob Avakian, 2005 [111]
Let’s talk about the cult of personality in its own right.
Bob Avakian wrote in 1984:
“[T]here is also a dialectical relation — unity as well as opposition — between cult(s) of the individual around leading people and on the other hand ease of mind and liveliness, initiative, and creative, critical thinking among party members and the masses following the party. In the future communist society, this need for firmly established revolutionary authority as an ‘anchor’ will no longer exist and would run counter to developing the critical spirit and critical thinking; it too will have to be abolished as an important part of the advance to communism. But to demand its abolition now runs counter to that advance, and to unleashing and developing that critical spirit and critical thinking.” [112]
A decade later, he agrees with himself:
“This statement (from A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror) puts it right: there is unity and opposition here — between, on the one hand, authority invested or embodied in certain individuals and, on the other hand, ease of mind and liveliness, individual initiative and creativity and critical thinking among party members and the masses broadly.” [113]
This only gets it half-right. Meaning: he gets it wrong.
You can promote revolutionary leadership and authority in ways that do not unleash critical thinking and initiative. You can promote awe and slavishness. You can unleash a cascade of elitism and disrespect that showers down through your own organization with far-reaching consequences.
What Avakian downplays is that there has been sharp struggle among communists over what kind of authority to give leaders, and over which world outlookshould imbue the way leaders are viewed. The style and content of Avakian’s promotion, its formal assertion of specialness, is connected to the reasons his party as a whole does not hear other people and disrespects its own rank-and-file. It is rooted in errors of line.
This question can’t be explored here in the needed depth. But I want to contribute to the larger discussion by raising Mao’s little-known struggle against “the genius theory” — because of ways Mao’s approach contrasts with Avakian’s.
In the late ‘50s, new leaders of the USSR were knocking down the authority of the revolutionary past. They focused their attacks on Stalin. Mao responded in 1958:
“There are two kinds of cult of the individual. One is correct, such as that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the correct side of Stalin. These we ought to revere and continue to revere for ever. It would not do not to revere them. As they held truth in their hands, why should we not revere them? We believe in truth; truth is the reflection of objective existence. A squad should revere its squad leader, it would be quite wrong not to. Then there is the incorrect kind of cult of the individual in which there is no analysis, simply blind obedience. This is not right. Opposition to the cult of the individual may also have one of two aims: one is opposition to an incorrect cult, and the other is opposition to reverence for others and a desire for reverence for oneself. The question at issue is not whether or not there should be a cult of the individual, but rather whether or not the individual concerned represents the truth. If he does, then he should be revered. If truth is not present, even collective leadership will be no good. Throughout its history, our Party has stressed the combination of the role of the individual with collective leadership.” [114]
Mao and his followers started to talk about “Mao Tsetung Thought” in the 1940s. It is a historical fact that this assertion of a new synthesis came after Mao had actually started to lead millions on a new road toward liberation, after he was actually leading both an army and expanding liberated zones in the midst of revolutionary war. Mao’s theoretical innovations were worked out and tested in that living practice of making a revolution. They were the dividing line within that movement between revolution and several wrong lines (including Stalin’s).
Mao did not declare his own words “historic.” He actually made history.
Then in the mid-sixties, Mao consciously used his existing prestige and authority to promote a new and less-well-understood program for the next stage of the revolution. When millions of people rallied to his banner in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), it was politically significant that they already loved and trusted him as a tested, visionary emancipator. There was nothing artificial or crudely self-declared about it.
At the same time, fierce struggle erupted over how Mao would be presented and how his line should be promoted. And in that struggle, Mao fought the so-called “genius theory.” The RCP, which has written much on Mao’s last battles, has only mentioned this Maoist campaign in passing references. [115] Let’s rectify that.
Mao Against the Genius Theory
While Mao was unleashing millions to “storm heaven” during the Cultural Revolution, powerful forces within his party were straining to channel everything into conservative directions. Already in 1966, Lin Biao [116] was using a “genius theory” to promote awe of the state and its leaders.
Lin claimed that:
“Chairman Mao’s sayings, works, and revolutionary practice have shown that he is a great proletarian genius…. He is unparalleled in the present world. Marx and Engels were geniuses of the nineteenth century; Lenin and Comrade Mao Zedong are the geniuses of the twentieth century.”
Later Lin raised Mao even further:
“A genius like Chairman Mao emerges only once in several hundred years in the world and in several thousand years in China.”
In essentially religious ways, it was argued that Mao’s work was a supreme “pinnacle” or “acme” of communist thinking. Lin said,
“Every sentence of Chairman Mao’s works is a truth, one single sentence of his surpasses ten thousand of ours.” [117]
The writings of other communist leaders (past and present) disappeared from the study lists after Lin declared:
“In the classical works of Marxism-Leninism, ninety-nine per cent of our studies must be from Chairman Mao’s works.”
Even statements that are true (literally speaking) helped emphasize obedience over conscious understanding. For example Lin Biao said:
“We must carry out not only those instructions we understand, but also those we fail to understand for the moment, and must try to understand them in the course of carrying them out.” [118]
This contributed to a trend of rote memorization (in contrast to scientific study, application and deepening understanding).
Communism’s anthem, the Internationale, has a famous phrase that rejects the idea of supreme saviors. At one point in China, the song was rewritten to cut that phrase out. [119]
Starting in 1966 Mao was called Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander and Great Helmsman. And soon those “four greats” were formally required in official statements. Respect for a communist leader was being twisted into enforced public rituals of praise and deference.
The struggle over these ideological matters came to a head with a political offensive by Chen Boda, Lin Biao’s ally. Chen came to a major party meeting (the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee in August 1970), and demanded that the agenda be thrown out. He insisted that the party leadership should adopt this notion of genius as a cardinal question. In a related organizational move, he insisted on a new emperor-like post of “state chairman” be created for Mao. This amounted to the first step of a coup d’etat, in which an arrogant military-fascist cult of obedience would be imposed on once-revolutionary China and an institutional framework for military dictatorship would be put in place.
Mao fought back by sharply repudiating this genius theory. [120] After days of struggle, Chen was beaten back. In April 1971, Mao started popularizing his rejection of the genius theory — as an opening shot of his struggle with the Lin forces generally. Mao told regional leaders:
“The question of genius is a theoretical question. Their theory was idealist apriorism. Someone has said that to oppose genius is to oppose me. But I am no genius. I read Confucian books for six years and capitalist books for seven. I did not read Marxist-Leninist books until 1918, so how can I be a genius?… I wrote ‘Some Opinions.’ which specially criticizes the genius theory, only after looking up some people to talk with them, and after some investigations and research. It is not that I do not want to talk about genius. To be a genius is to be a bit more intelligent. But genius does not depend on one person or a few people. It depends on a party, the party which is the vanguard of the proletariat. Genius is dependent on the mass line, on collective wisdom… I spoke to Comrade Lin Biao and some of the things he said were not very accurate. For example he said that a genius only appears in the world once in a few centuries and in China once in a few millennia. This just doesn’t fit the facts. Marx and Engels were contemporaries, and not one century had elapsed before we had Lenin and Stalin, so how could you say that a genius only appears once in a few centuries? In China there were Ch’en Sheng and Wu Kuang, Hung Hsiu-ch’üan and Sun Yat-sen, so how could you say that a genius only appears once in a few millennia? And then there is all this business about pinnacles and ‘one sentence being worth ten thousand’. Don’t you think this is going too far? One sentence is, after all, just one sentence, how can it be worth ten thousand sentences? We should not appoint a state chairman. I don’t want to be state chairman. I have said this six times already. If each time I said it I used one sentence, that is now the equivalent of sixty thousand sentences. But they never listen, so each of my sentences is not even worth half a sentence. In fact its value is zero.”
“You should study the article written by Lenin on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Eugene Pottier. Learn to sing ‘The Internationale’ and ‘The Three Great Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention’. Let them not only be sung but also explained and acted upon. ‘The Internationale’ and Lenin’s article express throughout a Marxist standpoint and outlook. What they say is that slaves should arise and struggle for truth. There never has been any supreme saviour, nor can we rely on gods or emperors. We rely entirely on ourselves for our salvation. Who has created the world of human beings? We the laboring masses. During the Lushan Conference I wrote a 700-word article which raised the question of who created history, the heroes or the slaves.” [121]
There are obvious parallels between what Chen Boda and Lin Biao argued and what the RCP promotes around Avakian. But I am leery of using analogies crudely. So let me note some differences instead:
- Mao had a lot of truth in his hands. Mao Tsetung Thought emerged from critical examinations of the Soviet experience, deepened by the lessons from decades of revolution, war, and state power. By contrast, I think Avakian’s synthesis has significantly less truth, and is methodologically distanced from practice.
- Mao did not deny that there were outstanding leaders or even geniuses among humans. But he opposed an incorrectmethod of describing and promoting his leadership: the particular “genius theory,” the ritual “4 Greats” and the stress on blind obedience. In the U.S. unfortunately, it is Avakian himself who formulates the theory concerning “caliber” and enforces those ritual words about a “unique, rare, special, and irreplaceable” person.
- Chen Boda and Lin Biao’s theories were raised and then repudiated in the throes of a great revolution. Now we encounter their ghosts under very different circumstances, and the repudiation is just getting started.
The best revolutionary leaders need to be known, valued, and followed. Their correct methods should be emulated. There are times when leading directives need to command great authority and quick action. There are periods when key leaders are objectively irreplaceable. And clearly, great efforts should be made to anticipate and defeat “decapitation strategies.”
In that sense I agree with Mao’s point about “revering” leaders.
At the same time we should not adopt any theories of a tiered humanity — with a formal insistence on the specialness of some people. We should not embrace the phrase “cult of personality” the way Bob Avakian does in his memoir. The word “cult” means organized worship, and worship is opposed to our social values and materialist outlook.
Leaders and the defense of leaders are necessary for real material reasons. But there is no material necessity to make cults around communist leaders. There are important reasons not to do so.
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Notes
[109] Letter to Wilhelm Blos, Nov. 1877 as Marx was working to finish his historic work, Capital. Our translation from German.
[110] David Milton and Nancy Dall Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside – Years in Revolutionary China – 1964-1969, Pantheon Asia Library, 1976
[111] Avakian describing an exchange from his 1979 speaking tour. From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, p. 393, Insight Press, 2005
[112] Bob Avakian, A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror RCP Publications, 1984, p. 212
[113] Getting Over the Two Great Humps: Further Thoughts on Conquering the World, Later published as “On Proletarian Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship: A Radically Different View of Leading Society: Part 9: Individual Leaders and the Larger Interests of Society and the People,” Revolutionary Worker #1222, December 14, 2003
[114] Mao Tsetung, “Talks At The Chengtu Conference,” March 1958, marxists.org
[115] There are mentions of Mao’s opposition to the “genius theory” in Raymond Lotta’s essay in And Mao Makes 5 – Mao Tsetung’s Last Great Battle (1978) and Bob Avakian’s The Loss in China and the Revolutionary Legacy of Mao Tsetung (1978).
[116] Lin Biao was the head of revolutionary China’s military and a leading figure within the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He was also, after the mid-60s, briefly seen as Mao’s most likely successor.
[117] Lin Biao, “Informal Address,” cited in Lowell Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution — The Post-Liberation Epoch 1949-1981, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 253–67.
[118] New China News Agency, 23 January 1968.
[119] Jean Daubier, A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
[120] Unfortunately the 700-word essay Mao wrote and circulated at that meeting has been lost. The writer Han Suyin said she had access to this work (called “Some Opinions”) when researching her Wind in the Tower biography of Mao. Mao himself characterizes the essay’s arguments in the talks with regional leaders that I quote here.
[121] Mao Tsetung, “Talks With Responsible Comrades At Various Places During Provincial Tour,” from the middle of August to September 12, 1971, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. IX, marxists.org
Mao makes the methodological point that he learned from others before acting, and describes the value of reading other communist leaders. He fights for a communist understanding of the mass line – in opposition to the reactionary view that history rests on the arrival of great saviors.
The Internationale anthem of communists contains the relevant refrain “Il n’est pas de sauveurs suprêmes, Ni dieu, ni César, ni tribun” – in English, “There are no supreme saviors, not god, emperor nor tribune.”
Published: December 2007 Available online at mikeely.wordpress.com
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Appreciator said
How to execute the culture of appreciation, promotion and popularization? I have a few suggestions.
There should be pictures of Bob on the walls of the homes of party members and supporters. These could range from posters to oil paintings. They might show Bob alone, or alongside Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
Also, images of Bob ranging from ceramic figurines to bronze statues should be produced and popularized.
Fresh flowers should be presented near these images, replaced regularly. At appropriate times, incense should be burnt.
A culture of bowing to these images should be popularized.
Colorful lapel pins and buttons bearing Bob’s face should be popularized.
Songs should be composed in honor of Bob, some of them based on the childhood narrative sections of the autobiography. The entire work could be set to music, and performed as a ballet.
Songs about Bob should be specially prepared for small children.
Revolution Books stores should be converted into New Synthesis Study Centers, where people could get more deeply into the synthesis, and wrangle over Bob’s epistemological break.
Artifacts from Bob’s life should be displayed in these centers, so that party members and supporters might touch them and feel reinvigorated.
Bob Avakian holiday greeting cards should be designed.
Bob-beads, to be used as memory aids while reciting quotations from Bob’s “Bullets” should be crafted of ivory, gemstone, crystal etc.
Party members and supports should be encouraged to take vows of celibacy, to better focus on the culture of appreciation.
Thoughtful gifts of all kinds should be sent to Bob, expressing appreciation.
Appreciator said
In the 1939 Hollywood film script, The Wizard of Oz, the humble band of the Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Lion led by the heroic Dorothy (Judy Garland) are suckered into believing that the Wizard of Oz can solve their various problems. When they meet him, hidden behind a curtain, using all kinds of devices to awe and intimidate them, he tells him he will solve their problems if they can bring him the broomstick of the wicked witch of the west. This after great effort they do, with no help from him.
When they ask him to follow through on his promises to them, he orders them to return the next day. Dorothy—that dirt-poor kid from Kansas, whose Aunt Em has taught her some values—in particular is indignant. No longer awed, she starts wrangling with the wizard. She pulls down the curtain to reveal a mere human being at the controls.
“Who are you?” she demands? “You humbug!” snorts Scarecrow. The Lion adds, “Yeah.”
“You’re a very bad man!” declares Dorothy, to which the wizard, exposed, can only reply meekly, “Oh, no, my dear — I’m — I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad Wizard.”
I have the sense that cult built by our current wizard, wrapped both in secrecy and pretense, now “hangs by a thread.” My deep thanks to Mike for pulling aside the curtain. Maybe Chairman Bob will come to realize that he can’t just dismiss as “mostly middle forces” those who are “disturbed” by his cult, and have to realize he’s in fact just a very bad cult leader.
Of course the Wizard of Oz story is all a dream. Dorothy wakes up at the end. Our “somewhere over the rainbow” aspirations at some point need to “engage” real revolutionary communist theory and practice. Only then can we (in, around and in the past friendly to the party) awaken from the bad dream the RCP has become.
Eric said
Ely’s criticism of Avakian is welcome, but doesn’t go far enough. He tries to salvage Maoism while discarding Avakianism. I wrote a criticism of Avakianism and cultism a few years ago (http://home.flash.net/~comvoice/36cCult.html), in which I tried to show the continuity between Maoism and Avakianism.
Ely quotes Marx saying that he refuses to reply to any adulation except “with a snub here and there”, and that he holds hostility toward “any superstitious awe of authority” — in other words Marx directly opposed cultism. Ely also selects a quote from Mao to display next to Marx’s, in which Mao opposes deliberate manufacture of cults. These two quotes he sets next to one from Avakian, wholeheartedly endorsing the effort to build up a cult around Avakian. Ely’s implication is that Marx and Mao agree on this question, and Avakian has broken with Marxist-Maoist tradition.
But, this quote of Mao’s shows that Mao holds a very different position from Marx’s. In these quotes, Mao shows not direct hostility towards all adulation of individuals within the communist movement, but only a caution that “prestige established artificially will inevitably collapse”, in other words, such artificially constructed cultism is weak and ineffective (not that there is something wrong with the very notion of cultism, as Marx says). In a quote Ely provides later, Mao also says directly that some forms of cultism are “correct”.
Both Mao and Avakian deliberately developed cults around themselves, as Ely points out: “Mao and his followers started to talk about ‘Mao Tsetung Thought’ in the 1940s”. The only difference that concerns Ely is that Mao did it after he “led millions … toward liberation”, while Avakian did so without having “led millions”. But this distinction is clearly at odds with Marx’s direct hostility toward all adulation, and Ely makes no attempt to reconcile these ideas. Instead, the approach is like parsing the words of the apostles: Mao said this, Marx said that, and since everything they both said is true, we don’t have to look too closely at whether they agree on what they say.
There is good reason why Marx was hostile toward cultism. The whole approach taken by both Mao and Avakian has a deeply corrosive aim, corrosive of the communist project of building a society in which privilege is banished. That aim is to hold the words of certain individuals to a different standard than those of others.
Mao’s “Marx, Engels, Lenin … we ought to revere and continue to revere for ever” translates to “don’t think as critically when reading Marx (or Engels or Lenin) as you do when reading another author”. Then, once this “principle” is established, Mao slyly slips himself into the list, another “hero” to be “revered” (and therefore accepted uncritically).
Yet, if Marxism is correct, isn’t one’s understanding of Marx strengthened by reading him critically, and specifically not revering him, but treating him as a human who, while he did a great deal of work to advance the struggle, was also human, and made errors? And if Marxism, which is a set of principles outlined by an individual, and developed and expanded upon by the experiences and summations of experience of millions, is correct, then isn’t the communist movement strengthened by encouraging everyone to read and understand what Marx wrote critically, looking for where Marx may have been wrong, where subsequent historical events may have provided further insight into Marx’s ideas, where it requires adjustment, rethinking, and so forth?
The basic framework Marx laid out (and Lenin furthered) is entirely correct, and world developments, far from disproving Marxism, have confirmed them over and over. But to know this, one has to study what he said critically, and study world developments, and make an assessment of how well they match up.
In some details, Marx may have been mistaken. Things which Marx wrote have been interpreted by some to suggest he thought that proletarian revolution in several bourgeois nations was around the corner. Lenin hoped that the revolution in Russia would be followed quickly by revolutions in Europe. Were they wrong? If so, why? What can we learn from the fact that capitalism seems far more resilient and flexible (though still every bit as exploitive) than it was originally thought? How has imperialism changed in the last 90 some-odd years since Lenin wrote about it, that has allowed it to continue despite its terrible contradictions? “Revering” Marx or Lenin discourages a serious investigation into these and hundreds of other questions, which can’t be touched if we take their word as gospel.
Avakian says that “in the future communist society, this need for firmly established revolutionary authority as an ‘anchor’ will no longer exist and would run counter to developing the critical spirit and critical thinking”, but he says nothing about why cultism is needed now, or why it won’t be needed then. But most amazingly, he suggests that somehow revering him now helps comrades develop “critical spirit and critical thinking” (How?!? ). But Ely doesn’t take issue with this idea of Avakian’s. And Mao (and by implication, Ely, who quotes him approvingly) treats this whole question of in a simpleminded way: “they held truth in their hands, why should we not revere them?” — they have been anointed (perhaps by God?). He tries to soften the obvious implication that reverence means uncritical acceptance, by saying that “blind obedience … is not right”. But promotion of cultism does nothing but promote at least partial blind acceptance. For example, as we see in Ely’s letter, his acceptance of the cult of Mao leads him to take what Mao says uncritically and fail to question how it fits with Marxism, or with reality.
Pavel said
On the one hand I think: this strategy of launching BA into the superstructure isn’t going to work.
On the other I wonder how far it might go.
In Oct. 2005 Berkeley Councilpersons Kriss Worthington (Democrat) and Dona Spring (Green) hosted a reception to celebrate the release of Bob’s autobiography, in Berkeley City Hall. That was surprising to me.
And if Lotta’s campus tour and Susara Taylor’s Fox appearances are testing the waters for Bob at Harvard and on Fox and CNN, the results just might be surprising.
I don’t know whether to suggest that there’s a method in the madness or that the method to at least get BA in the public eye is in itself (however one estimates Bob) methodical and intelligent.
I say that as someone who (again) finds the “culture of AP&P” very disturbing.
Would just like to know what others think.
tellnolies said
I would not be at all surprised if the RCP were able to get Avakian some TV interviews and some speaking engagements at elite universities. All sorts of crackpots with some organization behind them can do that. (Though Chomsky’s near-total inability to get on TV should give us an idea of how Avakian will be treated if he becomes percieved as a real threat.) I’m sure that some more oddball events like the one in Berkeley can be pulled off as well.
Thats a far cry, however, from actually establishing Avakian as an influential thinker/leader among the intelligentsia or in US society at large. And this is where the actual content and rigor of his ideas will really matter. As an avowed communist he will, of course, be held to the highest standards by the minority willing to even give him a hearing, and this is where what Mike calls his dilletantism will just kill him. That sort of dilletantism is widely tolerated when it comes from public apologists for the system, but not from its critics.
The problem is that while the RCP is demanding that people “engage Bob Avakian” they are completely unable to actually have an open back and forth discussion with people who do so critically, which is frankly how the vast majority of people have and will continue to respond to Avakian.
My differences with Avakian aside, I really wish this weren’t so. It would be great if communist ideas of any kind were really being engaged in US society.
NSPF said
pavel,
your observations make it all the more clear that a correct counter-argument to RCP’s Culture of Appreciation must not be the other side of the same coin of pragmatism: that is, it won’t work.
The problem is that when(not if)it works, the end pruduct is not going to be what you had in mind when you started. it will not change the world, it will change you.
I take your observations as yet one more thoughtful argument against shallow and emotional rejection of “delusions of grandeure”.
Even IF this could be shown to be an atribute of the thig we are talking about, still we can not know the thing by concentrating on this.
To know any given “thing” or “object” we have to get to the essence of the thing. Enumerating its attributes, or even worst concentrating on a single attribute won’t get us any closer to knowing the thing in the Marxist sense of the word.
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