Nine Letters to Our Comrades

Letter 3: Forays, Wrong Turns and Blaming the People

by Mike Ely

In 2000, on the 25th anniversary of the RCP, the Revolutionary Worker wrote:

“We have forged deeper ties with the masses, joining, learning and leading in their struggles: The battle against police brutality and murder; the vicious discrimination that infests this system; the repression and super-exploitation of immigrants; the fight for the liberation of women; the battles against the unjust wars waged by this system… and more.” [26]

There was some truth to that, then. Can any one look at the party today and still say that?

Problems of dogmatism, self-isolation and political fantasy — that have always plagued the RCP and contended within its politics — are now in command to a new degree. The heart of this — both its theoretical core and most visible manifestation — is how the RCP’s central leader, Bob Avakian, is seen and promoted.

The RCP now holds that “once a unique leader of this caliber emerges” the tasks and responsibilities of the party and its members change — in ways that directly impact revolutionary strategy. “If we don’t do anything else,” it is said, “we must do the promotion of this leader well.” This concentrates a major change in line. While the RCP still seeks to lead struggle around major faultlines in society, such crucial work clearly takes a back seat to the promotion of this cult of personality.

One graphic comparison reveals a great deal about the change:

On the left is the RCP’s poster from May Day 1980. On the right is the cover on Revolution newspaper’s 2007 “Special Issue on Bob Avakian.” The cover on the right is clearly a retread of the poster on the left. That similarity creates a chance to “compare and contrast the lines”:

In 1980, the RCP was putting out a challenge to advanced workers, who are portrayed in a doorway, possibly on the verge of stepping out, alone if necessary, with their eyes set on dreams of red flags and revolution. It is a poster that is marked in some ways by a lingering workerism — complete with hard hat, factory setting and a presumably male figure. However (setting all that aside) the political essence of the poster was posing a choice to the workers themselves about daring to act and transform the political stage in a revolutionary direction.

By contrast, the 2007 cover shows the uplifted profile of a party supporter with eyes fixed intently on the word “leadership.” It is an act of adoration. The challenge now is not “Take history into our hands!” It is now “Engage with Bob Avakian,” to become a “follower.”

Previously the party’s work was seen as rooted in “What-Is-To-Be-Done-ism.” It involved being a “tribune of the people” using lively and compelling communist exposure, agitation and propaganda that “put before all our communist convictions.” It envisioned a paper as an organizational “scaffolding” and “collective organizer” for a diverse and growing revolutionary movement. It aspired to being a newspaper that could “cast a line” far beyond the organized ranks of communists.

Promotion of Avakian is now at the center of work.

The RCP now holds that there are “two mainstays” of communist work — one “mainstay” is the work of “AP&P” (developing the appreciation, promotion and popularization of Avakian). The other “mainstay” is the work of the newspaper. And the newspaper has also been reconceived to give greater weight to Avakian’s theoretical articles and to promoting his “re-envisioning of communism,” while the concepts of agitation and exposure have undergone a related transformation. This new conceptual package is called “Enriched What-Is-To-Be-Done-ism.” That enrichment is a negation of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. It represents a different (and idealist) view of how the activity and consciousness of people can be diverted in a communist direction.

The “two mainstays” formulation marks a major departure from the Party’s previous strategic views. One way or another, the Party’s 2001 New Draft Programme [27] has been superseded — though replacement formulations are not public yet.

The net effect is that the promotion of Avakian — as a person, leader and theorist — is much more fully at the center of the Party’s work, including its new conception of the communist press.

In this synthesis, the organized collectivity of the party has been demoted to an “instrumentality” of the great leader. Several promising projects of mass struggle have been allowed to wither, or been transformed into “vehicles” for get-rich-quick fantasies.

For example, on October 5, 2006, the RCP had plans to conjure a government-shaking movement into being. They were spectacularly unsuccessful. Avakian later said:

“All this — and the whole experience that is captured with the metaphor of living in the house of Tony Soprano — does come back around to the question of complicity. Now, in this connection I want to say a few things about the mobilization on October 5 (2006) that was called by World Can’t Wait, and the fact that, frankly, in terms of numbers and accordingly in terms of impact, this fell far short of what was needed. Now, as Maoists, we’re not supposed to blame the masses when things don’t go well. But goddamnit — I want to blame the masses a little bit! Not strategically. Ultimately it is our responsibility — it is the responsibility of those who do understand the urgent need for massive opposition and political resistance to this whole course that the Bush regime is driving things on. But in line with, and as a part of, that responsibility, terms have to be presented sharply to people. Someone made the point that we should say to those people who knew about October 5, and who said they agreed with its basic stance and aims but did not come out that day: ‘Shame on you if you sat on your ass on October 5! If you knew about it or had a basis to know about it and you did not make use of this vehicle and help make this vehicle as powerful as possible — shame on you’!”

“I want to say, just for the record, that at times I myself have been acutely disappointed by — and, yes, have cursed in graphic terms — the people in this society who are sitting by and doing nothing in the face of atrocities and horrors committed by their government and in their name…” [28]

Let’s unpack this: The “vehicle” has been built and the masses have (yet again!) not responded according to plan. And who gets the blame?

“I want to blame the masses…”

Not the current party leadership. Not the plan. Who is left (logically) to blame but the masses (and the lower level of cadre)?

It is as if the RCP’s leadership feels their pearls have been cast before swine. [29] Is every utterance of leadership a gem? Does skeptical withholding of “appreciation” by comrades and the masses mean they are “part of the problem”?

Impending failure of many kinds drives forward a farrago of scapegoating.

There is complicity and corruption within an imperialist superpower. But blaming, shaming and literally cursing the masses is wrong — both in principle and in this particular case. (And it is wrong with or without a caveat like “Ultimately it is our responsibility.”)

On the Mass Line

Here leaders dream up grand schemes out of whole cloth — without forming alliances, constituencies or trained networks over time. They don’t have their own base to bring to the process. They “plan” to reach millions without actually organizing thousands — as if the masses will be jolted by public appeals in newspaper ads and made to flow, like water, through a quickly engineered canal.

We should be suspicious of such contrivances and “get rich quick” schemes. They flow from a sectarian view of what “proletarian leadership of the united front” means, of how a revolutionary movement is built and led.

A plan to reach millions without organizing thousands.

A party without a correct mass line — without a correct approach toward leading and learning from the people — cannot hope to lead a great revolution or a new society. This is a problem that urgently needs theory, struggle and solution.

The RCP has understood that communists can’t merely hold a mirror up to the masses to reflect (and politically tail) whatever people already know and think. This party has understood that communist work needs to bring revolutionary, scientific understandings from without — from outside the experiences, struggles and understandings that the people themselves spontaneously generate.

However these crucial insights have been applied in a sterile and sectarian way. The RCP has not correctly appreciated the importance of actually organizing the advanced to win over the intermediate in their masses. There is little practical sense of alliance, coalition or protracted engagement with other political forces or with important sections of the people. There is little sense of how people, in their masses, learn through struggle (even as communist political work and leadership “diverts” that process to influence how radical it gets).

Summation will have to be made of how much specific “mass initiatives” gave rise to real organization, breadth, ferment and struggle – certainly efforts around Mumia Abu-Jamal, police brutality, and early antiwar work had a real breath of life. These efforts often represented a desire to take initiative and respond to burning issues in society. However overall, and especially more recently, the RCP’s “mass initiatives” have taken on a more and more skeletal and self-isolating nature.

Becoming a Living Vanguard: Protracted Fusion or Last-Minute Telescoping

The belief that huge movements will congeal around prefabricated vehicles is no minor or recent problem: The RCP itself has been conceived as such a “vehicle.”

The RCP originally emerged from a political upsurge where revolutionary forces had real, if primitive roots among the people. But those roots shriveled as that upsurge died. In the 1980s, the party correctly stressed its need to have tens of thousands of “organized ties” in each city and established political base areas in order to be able to make an approach to power.

However as those goals were not accomplished, the party seems to have fallen back, more and more, on a mythology – where at some future point the masses of people will come to “the rescue of a few scores” of revolutionaries. Lenin’s poetic phrase is often taken too literally, as if a small stubborn agitation-based organization can have its correctness and leadership suddenly discovered by awakening millions and can then catapult to power “in a telescoped way.”

As if zero-to-60 is possible — if all the gears are clicking, if the moment’s right, and if full appreciation of the “Main Man” is in command.

This is an illusion.

This conception of forging a vanguard has never produced either a revolution or a real vanguard party with deep living roots among the people. It rests on an instrumentalist distortion of the Bolshevik history. [30]

No substantive revolutionary party ever came to have social weight through some magical “telescoping” from a few “scores” of rootless communists — not Mao’s Communist Party and Red Army (who emerged from the earlier Nationalist upsurge), or the German KPD (who emerged with major forces out of the previous Social Democratic movement), not the Naxalites of India nor the Maoists of Nepal.

And it was never true of the Bolsheviks either. Early in Lenin’s work he put it this way:

“Only the fusion of socialism with the working-class movement has in all countries created a durable basis for both. But in every country this combination of socialism and the working-class movement was evolved historically, in unique ways, in accordance with the prevailing conditions of time and place. In Russia, the necessity for combining socialism and the working-class movement was in theory long ago proclaimed, but it is only now being carried into practice. It is a very difficult process and there is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that it is accompanied by vacillations and doubts.” [31]

The Bolsheviks were occasionally decimated by repression. The links were often broken between their leaders in exile and their activists on the ground. But this was nonetheless a party that emerged with deep connections to social movements against the maddening backwardness of Tsarist Russia and the brutal oppression of working people. [32]

Fusion of socialism with the struggles of the people according to conditions of time and place.

The Bolshevik Party was not just a few circles of Lenin’s followers who suddenly sprouted political wings “in a telescoped way.” They were a real party carved into the political life of that empire, with lively internal political life and raucous differences, real roots within a real social base (especially from 1905 onward), and an organizational capacity to influence and lead. They grew in both size and influence under that “awful” decade before 1917. [33]

All communist parties that have been able to seriously contend emerged organically, pulling their forces out of larger radical movements and broad anti-system intellectual currents by a living process of fusion and differentiation. To take power, especially if you intend to dismantle the old state — you need more than a line, or a “special” leader, or even a shadow cabinet — you need the organizational wellsprings of a shadow state emerging within the framework of the old order. You need to win over and train thousands of creative and hardened cadre capable of becoming the framework for the new state — a force capable of seizing power, directing the economy and its transformation, creating a new media, and so on.

And imagine how much more true this is now — given the mind-boggling complexity of modern society — than it was in agrarian China or semi-agrarian Russia.

Yes, in periods of intense crisis, many new forces can be attracted to existing revolutionary movements. Some things will have to be “telescoped,” but they can’t all be. As Avakian once knew, a political movement can “come from behind” but it can’t “come from nowhere.” To actually seize and hold power in a major social crisis, a revolutionary party needs to arrive at that crisis with flesh and bone.

So, how is a revolutionary vanguard forged under our conditions?

Seriously attempting this will require something quite different from what we now have. We need a revolutionary current that grows and emerges within the living tissue of today’s wrenching contradictions – as thousands of radical people go through a series of political processes together, under conditions where creative communist politics can seriously contend and transform. There is a necessary process with stages and leaps that you learn more about as they ripen – all as the revolutionary pole works to accumulate and transform organized forces. There are turning points where you either have critical mass and correct methods, or you are not in the game.

For all this, communists need a culture of organizing people to wage sharp struggle over the major questions of society. And we need a deeply creative new sense of how to bring revolutionary understandings to those who want to change the world.

To launch this process we need to criticize incorrect understandings entrenched in Avakian’s new synthesis. But that is only the start. This is a process that will deepen only as we learn more by doing more.

The RCP’s current path will not work.

In sum: The RCP’s current path and methods have not worked and will not work.

Its recent strategic turn is indifferent to the lessons of its own practice. It is a voluntarist attempt to magically leap over real obstacles and necessary stages in communist work. The assumption that things can come together, suddenly and massively, under communist leadership makes an idealist overestimation of spontaneity. If unchallenged, it will squander the remaining revolutionary communist forces within the U.S.

The Masses: Always “Out There,” Separate and Distant

Looking back, I have been struck by the damage done by the constant suggestion that a revolutionary crisis might be just over the horizon. It is as if the RCP has been operating through a series of two-year, or three-year plans — hurling itself into this, then pulling out to hurl itself into that. In fact, developing deep ties among the people requires perseverance, maturity, careful choices and real commitment to those choices — not a rootlessness that constantly shifts plans based on short-term speculations and expectations of quick growth.

It was a promising thing in the late 1980s, when the RCP raised to itself the importance of “coming from within.” And yet the party’s overall method repeatedly thwarted that process. The party’s work has remained a series of “forays” — constantly re-approaching people “from without,” as if they are some unexplored territory. Over and over, the party would pull back without real roots or networks, only to sally out again in some new direction with new hopes and schemes.

In a very typical statement, the party said (summing up disappointments in 2005):

“[T]he truth is this: the people that can make this into a movement of millions are out there. We have to get them.” [34]

In some important ways, the masses of people have always remained “out there” for this party — as something separate, distant, unresponsive, and very disappointing. Objective conditions played their role in this — but a bitter view of the people has taken root subjectively.

A revolutionary organization has to be integrated into struggles of the people — directly in its own name while connecting with (or initiating) a variety of other organizations. And it has to draw the thinking and activity of people toward creatively-conceived communist solutions to this awful capitalist present – a task which can only be accomplished with methods that are bold yet sophisticated (not hackneyed or infantile).

A revolutionary organization has to be integrated into living struggles while drawing everything toward communist solutions.

The issue here is, again, the mass line — which rests on an understanding that people need to emancipate themselves, and that it can’t be done “for” them. In a fundamental way, people (in their masses) are the makers of human progress and emancipation. This materialist insight has a series of necessary consequences for communist work and socialist society.

In words, the RCP affirms that revolution is an act of “the masses in their millions.” However, its methods of “mass work” have moved farther and farther away from organizing or learning from (or even appreciating) those people who are not interested in becoming “followers of Bob Avakian.” There is an overestimation of how much the communists already know, and an underestimation of the importance of knowing the people well, so that revolutionary communications can truly connect with our key audiences.

In place of the mass line, there is a one-sided stress on telling — in patronizing ways reminiscent of Christian evangelizing. As if communist analysis in convoluted detail will sprout a revolutionary movement with real social weight. Here the fetish of the word morphs into the fetish of the leader. It tries to “vault over” the complicated processes by which people really decide what to think and how to act.

Re-reading documents from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I noticed again how Mao believes people develop consciousness and sophistication in the course of political struggle. One key document announces: “Let the masses educate themselves in the movement.” [35] People learn to appreciate and apply the ideology of revolution and communism in the course of political struggle.

This is in contrast to Avakian’s linear view of first theory and ideology, and then mass organization:

“It is important to grasp this point that the need for radical change in society gets called forth in the superstructure — in the thinking of people, and then in the political organization of people. People form groups, they form parties with programs and objectives which reflect — reflect not in a reductionist, linear and one-to-one sense, but reflect ultimately — what’s going on in the basic relations in society, in terms, most fundamentally, of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. This gets reflected more or less consciously in people’s thinking and then in their political organization.” [36]

This linear view is embodied in the RCP’s current linear tactics: First study Avakian, then go tell people about it, then expect them to congeal as organization on that basis.

However, the ripening of a revolutionary people is in many ways an objective process. For example: The civil rights generation of African American activists were quite organized, while deeply wedded to bourgeois-democratic illusions about integration and voting. They became revolutionized by their practical experiences and by events that formed the larger context for that work.

Such moments of mass political experience cry out for revolutionary communist activity, so that strands of oppositional and revolutionary sentiments actually go over to communist consciousness and serious preparation.

I believe we may be entering such a radicalization period among immigrant workers in the U.S. — who come here as refugees of the larger “planet of slums.” [37] I hope we see such a period emerge among Black youth in the wake of Katrina and the Jena events.

We need to be very sensitive to such potential radicalization, and poised to respond with energy and strategic appreciation. We need to reclaim the understanding that we are responsible for organizing a specific political revolution for socialism in a specific country (as part of a world process). We need to build a base deep among the oppressed and proletarian. We need to persevere in bringing forward young advanced proletarians as communist political cadre and leaders of society generally. We need an inspiringly multinational movement that has deep thinking on the current conditions facing oppressed nationality communities and lives-and-breathes the struggle against racism and white supremacy. We need to create a visible, attractive, accessible revolutionary communist pole at every step of this process — whose solution of socialist revolution makes sense in a living way to growing numbers of people. We need a militant movement that dares light the sky in combative ways that stir the heart — not a risk-adverse trend that nervously jumps at shadows. And we have to do our work, wisely and well, in ways that protect the party’s links to the masses of people, not merely its crucial inner core.

And each part of that last paragraph stands in sharp contrast to the road the RCP has now taken.

Let’s grapple together again over how to actually build a base for revolutionary politics deep among the oppressed, learning from the positive and negative experiences of the past.

Previous Letter | Next letter..

 

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Notes

[26] “Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the RCP,USA,” Revolutionary Worker 1076, October 29, 2000, revcom.us

[27] New Draft Programme of the RCP,USA, 2001, revcom.us

[28] “Bringing Forward Another Way,” revcom.us

[29] A metaphor from the Bible, Matthew 7:6

[30] This is a distortion that grew over the 1920s, and reduced the living experience of the Bolshevik party to a dogmatic set of universal formulas, structures and forms.

[31] V.I. Lenin, The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement, 1900, marxists.org

[32] You can get a sense of the breadth of the anti-government resistance by the numbers of political prisoners held by the Tsarist government: 86,000 political prisoners in 1905 growing to 170,000 in 1909. (Simon Sebag Montefioer, Young Stalin, 2007)

[33] A few illustrations of the social weight of the Bolshevik party: The party entered the 1905 revolution with several hundred members in St. Petersburg. In early 1907, the Bolsheviks had a membership of over 2,000 in that city (LCW, vol.12, p.400). That year, their national membership is estimated at 46,000. The Bolsheviks often operated within the larger Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) which had a combined membership of 150,000. Around 1910, the Bolshevik apparatus was hit hard by repression, but by 1912, the Bolshevik party was strong enough to launch the newspaper, Pravda, in St. Petersburg. They had the organizational structure to fund, produce and circulate an average of 25,000 copies daily. After the 1912 elections, six Bolsheviks were elected to the 4th Duma (parliament) representing districts with over a million industrial workers. In St. Petersburg, the party led a citywide movement of radicalized workers who, by July 1914 on the eve of war, organized a general strike of 150,000 workers over both political and economic demands. Through the political crisis of 1917, Bolshevik ranks grew explosively. Party membership in the Viborg district had grown from 500 in March 1917, to 7,000 in October. In Petrograd as a whole, it went from 2,000 to 36,000. (Figures are largely from original Soviet sources, in Tony Cliff, Lenin 1, marxists.org)

[34] “November 2: The Real Beginning And The Challenge We Face,” Revolution 23, Nov. 20, 2005

[35] “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” adopted August 8, 1966, Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, rrojasdatabank.org

[36] Bob Avakian, “Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity,” 2007, revcom.us

[37] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006

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Published: December 2007
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