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Also, see our web page on crypto-Trotskyism, the RCP=U$A and the RIM which stole our name
As MIM has said before, the purpose that Bob Avakian serves in the RCP=u$A is as an anchor in a petty-bourgeois conglomeration. If you base yourself in a vacillating class, the need for an anchor cries out. However, there is a difference between a petty-bourgeois anchor like Avakian and a proletarian anchor like Lenin.
You will find not one paragraph in RCP=U$A literature able to provide a statement of rational knowledge concerning over 200 million people in the u$A that supposedly constitute an exploited majority. You will find only scattered statements about scattered patches of people. At the same time, you will find book length expositions, when totalled up, on why the RCP=u$A has Avakian as its leader.
So that this article does not become too long, I'm going to boil it down to a few points on how the RCP=U$A is a vicious cycle. First, the RCPers deliver the body blow to Maoism by failing to penetrate the parasitism question. Then they go for the knock-out blow by aiming for the head on the question of leadership.
Mostly MIM has drawn attention to the body blow. When we look at this vicious uppercut that they are trying to land on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, we see some finer points.
We cannot claim to have studied 1000 persynality cults. We do know that Marx and Engels explicitly opposed persynality cults from their position of not having seized state power and we do know that Mao and Stalin only had persynality cults after a certain accumulation of power. Now Avakian tries to say that the party out of state power should have the persynality cult.
Obviously the attention RCP=U$A pays to Avakian's leadership as opposed to the calculation of surplus-value plays into all the stereotypes that communists (and only communists) pursue power for its own sake. They do have the posters with Avakian's picture in the cap and they go to the effort to put them up. They don't have a calculation on parasitism.
In addition, Lenin told us it would be 1000 times easier to work with the IWW than the equivalent of the European social-democrats and centrists. With the increase in parasitism since that time, Avakian's move on the persynality cult reinforces the body blow. It makes us less attractive to the anarchists and that social base. Yet, Avakian still says he's following Lenin.
Downplaying class issues and playing up the role of the individual is the mark of idealist Amerikan politics harking back to the days of the first white settlers. It's something we are going to have to overcome, not accentuate. We see it all the time when people ask for a resume before they start talking politics with you. Instead of saying, "no you are wrong to put biography over substance, " Avakian plays right into Amerikan pragmatist habit. Then he and his followers wonder why he keeps having to repel requests that he abandon his post in favor of a Black leader or other persyn of color. Within the logic of using a persynality cult for revolution, Avakian simply locates it in the wrong place and time.
John Kerry travels with people from his Vietnam service days. All the people on his boat back his story up and proclaim him a hero. To keep this article short, let's call that "emotional capital," the bond between Kerry and his military buddies.
Let's put in that same category all the stuff Pat Robertson does with Jesus images. Obviously, when it comes to churches and military service, the enemy has the monopoly on emotional capital. It cannot be any other way except in massive losing war efforts. The bonds formed in war service for an imperialist state are going to tend to push in a certain direction.
In the Third World, they should not try to copy what MIM is saying here in a straight-line fashion. Comrade Gonzalo's thesis on the "militarization of the party" has to come up. It necessarily comes up once the People's War starts. The bonds among the proletariat are affected by People's War. Because of that fact, Mao said it was important that the party command the gun. MIM is not going to straighten all that out here.
Let me just give one example before we drop consideration on non-majority-exploiter countries. If non-party military fighters start to accumulate emotional capital and then challenge the party leadership, the question may become one of the party commanding the gun depending on the nature of the challenge. In that circumstance, the party may need to counter with a persynality cult and that could in fact be the least damaging way to resolve this problem. However, what Avakian does is encourage a party persynality cult when there is no false-but-necessary dynamic justifying it. He is not running an army or a state and he's not supposed to be thinking he's running a church as a substitute for a party. In fact, Avakian pisses away the two relative advantages of not having state power--which is one that people can look at you and wonder if in fact you are more objective and less ego-driven because you do not have state power and two, that you have time for "pure research" (just to exaggerate), because you are not administering pot-hole repair.
What we can say is that in the majority-exploiter countries without an armed struggle and where the party is not in charge of a predominance of the churches, and we've said this many times before, the party is a body of scientists first and foremost. Other formulations of this question stand on an incorrect understanding of who makes history. It also boils down to understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of the proletariat relative to the enemy. The enemy dominates the superstructure, especially its emotional side. If we choose to fight as a party on that turf, we emphasize our weakness. Our strength lies in our far-sightedness, the fact that Bu$h spends billions on intelligence, but for any prediction, you are better off reading MIM Notes than listening to Bu$h. The enemy will never match our scientific nimbleness, because capitalism holds back the production and distribution of science in certain predictable ways. We seek to build a credibility gap for the capitalist class.
In contrast, without saying so, the RCP=U$A believes that the pre-scientific intelligentsia is the base. This comes out most clearly with Avakian and crew's denouncing statistics, math, polls etc.--and let's be clear that it IS Avakian behind all that and right in print, and not just a random circle of his friends. Not surprisingly, the RCPers emphasize the persynality cult as a result. It all goes together.
From the RCPers' point of view, Avakian took Amerikans a few years removed from the 1950s and managed to get them to express their feelings for communism, at least through him. To this day, the RCP phenomenon is one of emotional expression, not Marxist-Leninist-Maoist science.
To reassure its own circles, the RCP=U$A releases statements from various individuals backing Avakian's leadership. This rebuts the pc crowd which may want some other leader than Avakian strictly on an individual basis. It's key to understand that the RCP=U$A always uses one set of pre-scientific statements to rebut other pre-scientific statements.
The question arises, is Avakian himself pre-scientific intelligentsia or just CIA. In terms of being able to judge this problem in the countless contexts it arises, it hardly matters. As some people will confuse the party with the masses, we will proceed as if there were really a line question and not an organized and intentional effort to deliver a blow to the head of Maoism.
What Avakian is doing, if done by someone in another sincere context, is both ultra-democracy and squelching of scientific initiative. Contrary to the bourgeois libertarians, we Marxist-Leninist-Maoists do not have democratic centralism to squelch science but to advance it. We believe that form of organization corresponds to reality in such a way as to promote science most.
The ultra-democracy comes in where Avakian is aiming the persynality cult. These are not his buddies from his Swift Boat. These are not Avakian's pals from the anti-war movement in the 1960s. No, Avakian aims the persynality cult at the alleged vanguard party itself, the place where MIM has stressed before must be a mighty fortress opposing subjectivism and politically charged emotions of any given moment. The party must be a reservoir of science.
As I said at the beginning though, the RCP=U$A is a vicious cycle. Unlike any previous genuine communist leader, Avakian is obviously saying it is necessary to put forward his persynality cult for party-building purposes. The question arises: why could that be so, and the answer is the underlying ultra-democratic assumption about RCP recruits.
One answer that Avakian is not going to accept or promote is that there is no basis for a vanguard party in the imperialist countries, so we must make use of "emotional capital" as I called it to shorten this article. (BTW, RCPers constantly refer to Avakian as their greatest "asset," so work with these metaphors.) Even if that were the truth, it would be wrong to call any resulting organization a scientific communist body. This would be a horrible example to put forward to the rest of the world which is capable of generating scientific communist organizations, and on that basis alone, we should have to nix this idea.
[HC123 interjects: Far from being an "asset", Avakian as a cult figure is a long-term liability for the RCP=U$A. What will become of the RCP=U$A once Avakian is gone? Will it publish a few plangent eulogies and then quietly shut up shop?
By putting the persynality of its leader ahead of everything else, the RCP=U$A betrays its political bankruptcy. To MIM, by contrast, a communist party's greatest asset is its political line--its very reason for being. Leaders may die, degenerate, even betray the movement, but a party with a correct line will live on. A party with an incorrect line, one that panders to public opinion instead of upholding science, will eventually lose ground despite the services of a charismatic leader.]
The answer we do get from Avakian time and time again amounts to a confusion of the distinct roles of the masses and leaders. It comes down to the question of discernment and "writing off." Ultra-democracy crowds out space for scientific struggle. That is the real reason that no one in the RCP=U$A can answer MIM's questions, and why answers from RCPers to all questions tend to be long-winded expressions of feeling or recitation. That is why RCP=U$A does not apply M-L-M to concrete conditions now and that is another reason that RCP=U$A was never Maoist. The most it can do is recite bits and pieces from someone dead that they read. The rest is what Avakian tells them to feel about current conditions. This subjectivism is guised as ideology. If it is ideology, it is the same as the Catholic Church's or the Moonies'.
In contrast, people with a grip on reality themselves already know in the back of their minds that the bloated parasitism of Amerika is as MIM says--and not because MIM said so. The people who know this are the ones with a sense of mathematical proportions and an attention to facts of the here-and-now: without MIM telling them, they know that the proportions they see in real life are impossible without the scale of exploitation of the Third World MIM is talking about. It's not just that they read Lenin say something about entire countries being parasitic, so they recite that and then MIM tells them to feel something about something today.
If there were no MIM at all, there would still be some people--possibly the vanguard without knowing it--who would see the proportions in reality. Because they do not see getting Avakian 90% popularity as the goal, the scientists are able to see that the parasitism question is a problem to be solved in its own right, not something tactical or strategic to sweep under the rug. In fact, it is not just "a" problem, because it is the whole problem, the key to Marxism and connected to everything Marx ever said about exploitation. There is something you are never going to get from the pre-scientific intelligentsia--a sense of what is goals and what is strategy and tactics. At any given moment, they will recite on tactics, when the question is goals. At another moment they will recite their ideological lesson-of-the-day from Avakian. All total, with the paeons to Avakian added in, the pre-scientific intelligentsia does have a lot to say. It all gets blown out of the water when you ask them for evidence for their positions. Why do you think prices are lower in the Third World? What is your evidence for thinking that Amerikans are not living in increasing luxury? What is the total super-profit? Back in the 1980s we used to ask them, what is your evidence that gays are gay because they are the specific products of imperialist decadence unlike the rest of us--as opposed to biology being the explanation for gay sexual orientation. And they would have no answer, except to get mad and say, "what do you mean, what is our evidence?" The best answer they could come up with is that "led by our Chairman we have done a lot of social investigation." Suddenly, we realize they have a lot to say, but it's all recitation and expression of feelings. That's the reason they are not really answering your question, unless you specifically ask them a question like "what is Avakian's stand?" on this or that.
In the articles RCPers write, not just in the Revolutionary Worker but everywhere, there is no emphasis on concentrated rational knowledge. What references there are tend to be to history or history of philosophy. Any other questions--well the answer is that Avakian is our leader. The ultimate reason is that the persyn in Avakian's role does believe that the party-building task is connected to rallying the pre-scientific intelligentsia, unfiltered artists with no training in science for example.
A corollary result of Avakian's leadership principles is the inability to distinguish between party-building and public opinion building. Once the party itself has been treated as an object of the persynality cult, the effect is to degrade the level of the party. Then building public opinion becomes the same thing as building the party.
That is not the right way to handle the leadership/led contradiction. The correct way is to "write off" and discern. People who would make perfectly good anti-war activists are treated by Avakian's crew instead as material worthy of persynality cult propaganda coaxing them into a party on an irrational basis. In fact, the contrary would be more correct--repelling potential party members on an irrational basis and seeing if they are able to carry out work. The Avakian approach simply crowds out science. Making space is a matter of repelling crud.
To make this accessible to practice, MIM makes a proposal:
1) Since RCP=U$A allegedly cannot find a cardinal principle in why our lines are different, it should dissolve. If RCPers oppose
dissolving it must be because they have a cardinal difference with us that they have not named. The tactics of some of the
pretended embrace of our position should cease. We have flushed it out with this proposal.
2) They should put their time into "Not in Our Name," and cease reference to M-L-M. If the ex-RCPers did so, MIM would publicize their efforts energetically, and whether they know it or not, MIM is better-read by the public than they are.
3) Within NioN, Bob Avakian should be a leader, an emotional asset. What he does now is incorrect though. It is not long-winded pre-scientific videos we need from him, but photo ops and a style of opposing war. His videos are only leading to "familiarity breeds contempt." Emotional ties that he is aiming at belong in mass organizations, not attempted scientific disquisitions.
If Bu$h can gain from 911 photo ops to promote war, Avakian should counter with his own persynality bubble. Any anti-war bubble that Avakian builds up, MIM will defend, including against anarchists.
4) "Revolution Books" should distribute MIM Notes and MIM Theory and resources for the "Revolutionary Worker" should go into the anti-war leaflets that will be necessary for demonstrations etc.
5) Our position via RIM should be that there should be no Comintern, but if it is prepared to concretely name the majority-exploiter countries, we can sign a joint resolution. Until that time, it would be best if the Third World parties would organize themselves into joint statements on Maoism without the imperialist countries.
The correct location of the persynality cult style that Avakian has is the mass organization, not the party.
Now we have heard some rather desperate arguments from people saying MIM has a persynality cult too. We used to hear this a lot more often, but one thing the Internet does is cut down on a lot of disempowered nonsense from people making excuses for themselves. A tiny percentage of MIM's readership knows whether individual writers are white, students, Black, lumpen, old, young, gay, straight, male, female, educated or uneducated. In face-to-face organizing we often hear the excuses, that disempowered people make for allegedly not being effective. Without question, the MIM website, MIM Notes and MIM Theory shred that all to pieces. People can contribute from whatever background and they will be read, heard or seen if they have something to say--period. So anyone who thinks young, lesbian wimmin cannot be heard, for example, because it's a white male dominated world--we invite you to contribute to MIM public opinion building: you may not be a leader, mainly because of what's in your own head, but you will contribute to public opinion building. There is a difference and we have increasing evidence that the masses understand for example, the difference between an ad hominem attack and a line struggle--again, thanks to MIM's particular style of separating the party from public opinion building sufficiently so that the masses can see that difference clearly. We should be clear, that before there was a MIM, no one in the field was doing that, and this is a big and unique advance that MIM has contributed for some years, one contribution we have made to the international communist movement. This advance is making working "at arm's length" possible and it is emphasizing the relative strengths of the proletariat against the imperialists.
Other times we have accusations of persynality cult because we have such a well-defined and specific line. This is part of a general resistance to scientific advance and we have to emphasize again and again that bitter scientific dispute is not sectarianism in itself. Nor is it evidence of a persynality cult. We the underdogs representing the proletariat can afford not one bit of a slacker attitude toward scientific dispute. In other sciences, we would never hear anything like what we hear leveled against MIM. No one says Einstein had a persynality cult, but he did have a very specific and unsettling contribution as did Darwin for example.
It also goes without saying that MIM does not distribute pictures of its leaders on posters, emphasize speech gestures through videos or collect up individual testimonials backing particular leaders--not that all that is wrong per se. MIM has avoided many of the problems connected to all of that through a process of discernment, by a correct assessment of the body and judgements on the head. Even if we had to compete directly with an organization with our principles, we would simply emphasize the history of our practice. There might be no reason to merge with or fight such an organization.
Now, lastly, I want again to distinguish from the Third World situation. The Peruvian comrades emphasized that their battle against RCP=U$A revisionism is against the leadership, a small clique of bureaucrats. This makes a great deal of sense, if the main aspect is Peru or any other Third World country. Avakian revisionism needed to be attacked, but to exaggerate its importance in Peru would not be right, no matter how much help the international communist movement needed. It would seem out of proportion, but in the united $tates, MIM has a different task and set of underlying questions that should never come up in Peru.
In the united $tates, the question is why there are since 1983 (MIM) and since 1993 (RCP=U$A) two organizations calling themselves Maoist defenders of the Cultural Revolution. Why did not RCP=U$A dissolve when it realized it considered itself Maoist? That is not just a question of the leaders, because of the question of the body blow RCP=U$A has landed by denying the true extent of parasitism.
Now, in their leadership-for-its-own-sake approach, some of them are saying our third cardinal is not cardinal and they did not dissolve in 1993, because Avakian's leadership is superior to ours. What we have to understand is that for them, leadership IS just emotional capital, not scientific struggle. They've put up posters of Avakian's mug and they've declared him a great of history and some have added that they want to tell him so before he dies.
We have a different approach to leadership. We don't want to hear about emotional attachments before the question of exploitation has been figured out. Leadership is scientific substance, not rallying the pre-scientific intelligentsia. MIM has jumped through some hoops. We sorted wheat from chaff and we've proven that it is possible, even if we are smashed tomorrow. As we've said many times before following Lenin, "better fewer, but better." If people have to jump through scientific hoops to be in a party, they don't need a persynality cult to keep the party moving forward--not in the majority-exploiter countries before the seizure of state power.