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For seven years I was one of the principle organizers for the October 22 Coalition in a major US city. I was also a RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party U.S.] supporter during that time. Recently, it has become clear that the RCP has summed up the work we did in October 22, and the mass work in general in the city that I live in, as having been basically led by a revisionist line. Apparently some of the things that I wrote on the 2changetheworld website regarding the mass line are being taken as concentrations of the revisionist line that predominated in the RCP’s mass work (in my city) during that period. There has been a turn to greater emphasis on paper selling and promoting Avakian as part of the shift away from and rectification of the sort of mass work we did when I was a supporter of the RCP.

Those here who followed the mass line and related debates on 2changetheworld might remember that, except at the very end, both I and those I was debating with on the mass line and other issues believed we were upholding the RCP’s line on the mass line. That is because I was running the line I was trained in by the RCP. During that whole time, I was working closely with the RCP and never received any indication that the line I was putting out on the website was considered wrong at all. In fact, all of the comrades in my (younger) age group who read the debate concurred that what I was saying represented what we had been trained in, and there was no feedback from older comrades.

It has come to my attention that the RCP is going around telling people, including people close to me, that I am a revisionist. If the RCP is going to do this, it should tell me so outright, and should take responsibility for training me in a revisionist (or ‘revisionist’) line. I do not expect people here to be able to address the particular errors being made by people who call one a revisionist behind one’s back but don’t say anything to your face.

But since I have never received a response to the dozens of papers I have written up for the RCP over the years, the only way to have any dialogue about this and to find out more about how the RCP is summing up the whole period of the 1990s mass initiatives, is to raise the issue for public discussion. And perhaps that is better. After all, these are life and death issues of revolution, even if part of my motivation here is to make better sense of what I was doing for 7 years of my life. In my opinion, the RCP has a responsibility to make an explicit summation of the work it did during that period.

What little discussion I have been able to have with RCP supporters on this topic has been contradictory. One local person described the work we had done as a “bridge to nowhere,” while someone at the O22 national office said that was an incorrect summation, but didn’t elaborate.

I really want to understand the thinking behind the RCP’s shift and what it is thinking about all the work that we did during the 1990s.

That said, I have some trepidation about entering into debate on this website. During the final period of the 2changetheworld debates, I think that the team that was putting forward the RCP’s line on that website took a basically dishonest turn in how they handled people who disagreed with them. One example of this is that, when I pointed out what I felt were factual inconsistencies between Dolly Veale’s description of some things STORM (or STORM supporters) had written and the actual written document, I was accused of having an identity politics line. Now, in my opinion, if Veale disagreed with me, she should have written out why she thought I was wrong, and how what she wrote was actually consistent with the original document. Instead, I was accused of having an identity politics line. As a European-American who spent years where much of my main work involved being the lone representative of the RCP’s line in situations where I was the only European-American around for miles (i.e. going to investigate police murders in Black and Latino neighborhoods, going to meetings of revolutionary nationalist groups to unite in struggle against police brutality, trying to win family members of police murder victims and the unjustly incarcerated to take up aspects of MLM and the RCP’s line, etc.), I find it incredible that I was accused of identity politics. That is exactly what identity politics says I should not have been doing, and I stand by much of that practice.

So, like I said, I have some trepidation about re-entering web-based dialogue with RCP supporters, given the attitude that was taken toward contrary opinions during the final period of the 2changetheworld debates. But I don’t think there is any other forum available for getting into these issues, so I suppose I have to keep my fingers crossed and hope that you all will be principled and thoughtful.

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I msg'd him about the post that he made. This is not the appropriate forum for this. Please do not repost this again.

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And I (personally) have a great deal of confidence (even without the details) that if a post was removed, it was for good reason. And I'm sure the moderators are debating any controversies among themselves.

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On another point: let me just say that I do not want to be part of a gossip forum...where unverifiable rumors and supposed "internal" details of revolutionary organizations are circulated for all kinds of purposes. This is not "questions" or principled politics.

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And let's develop, train and support a core moderator team that can do this -- since you precisely DON'T want to publish every outrageous charge and potential police plant publicly for EVERYONE to debate its veracity.

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We are on the eve of the RNC.

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And for those who aren't trying to accomplish something politically (i.e. in the real world), this framework I'm discussing may seem unnecessary and unfair. But that itself is part of the point. Because the point of our discussion (to me, and to many others) is precisely to "change the world", not to idly flap our gums around issues of common intellectual (or even E!-style personal gossip entertainment) curiosity.

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I was just thinking...I posted something in the Practice forum about the protest and a group called the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade that was going to protest in Central Park re: the permit against Peace and Justice group. I wonder now...if they are part of the RCP??

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I know the exact day that the insufficiency of the RCP's method became clear to me. It was one week before 20,000 students engaged in the largest anti-capitalist demonstration New York has seen in decades on March 23, 1995. It was when the student movement at the City University of New York (CUNY) began to take on a mass character in opposition to budget cuts. The activists, a diverse lot - though primarily people of color and working class - had fought hard for weeks over two basic questions: "Do we target the Republican state administration or capitalism/neo-liberalism," and "Do we unite with the Democrats and their flunkies or attempt to "divert" the spontaneous movement towards more revolutionary and anti-capitalist positions?"

Needless to say, these were hotly contested questions. And guess what? The revolutionaries won. They didn't just win a show of hands. They won scores of other people from numerous explicit and implicit political trends over to the more radical politics.

Immediately a NEW two-line struggle broke out: Do we have a big, permitted mass rally - or do we engage in this "new" thing called "direct action?"

At the particular mass meeting I had my RCP epiphany, about 150 activists were present and the room was wild. It was the kind of scene that taught me revolution really is possible.

Anyway, after months of organizing, the RCP finally got around to showing up. It wasn't worth the wait.

While we were having a heated debate about issues of legality, this 45-year-oldish white RCYB member got up, lifted his arm and held the Revolutionary Worker aloft. There was a gleam in his eye.

"All this talk isn't going to get you anywhere if you don't 'get down' with what RCP Chairman Bob Avakian has to..." He didn't get to finish his sentence because EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE ROOM began heckling and yelling so loudly that he had to slink out with his tail between his legs.

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Hey RS, NOW can you see some people's hesitation of aligning to any Party or joining any organization????

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But what was wrong with the tactic of organizing people of color against police terrorism, that it is now deemed as revisionist?

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This thread kept me up all night in a rage!

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Wherever they line up in the debates, thinkers agree that the notion of identity has become indispensable to contemporary political discourse, at the same time as they concur that it has troubling implications for models of the self, political inclusiveness, and our possibilities for solidarity and resistance.

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What really bothers me is how Avakian controls things and doesn't seem to allow the "party" much discretion in matters -- the very definition of a "party" is the whole participation and unity in principle and decision making. Rather it seems, he gets a group of people who will carry out his diabolical plan to become leader of the communist world.

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RCP..I fucked off a few years around those silly cats 15 years ago.

Avakian is nothing but a windbag.

I am re-posting this article on that site; just for the fuck of it.

Hello Bobby!

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I feel the shit hitting the fan with this thread.

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Avakian seems like a paper-shredder to me!

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My only problem is with...your sarcastic use of the terms "Great Leader" and "Dear Leader".

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Next thought was a matter of sharpening line: In fact, it is not just Avakian's ideas or his works that are promoted. But him as a leader. In other words, it is not just his works that are important. but his method. His approach. And also him as a person.

When they come for him, they will not just come for his books, but for him as a person.

When he leads in future decisive movements, it will not just be xeroxes of his past works that lead, but him (as a living person actually and literally LEADING.)

He is a key theoretical leader of the ICM, and a developer of MLM. but he is also a leader -- with all that means.

So there are actually issues of line: are we just promoting the ideas of this man, or are we talking about him as a person, a persona. Do the people need to "know his ideas" or do we need to help them know about HIM.

Similarly, are we simply following "his ideas" or are we following him.

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The mass line is the method through which the party both learns from and leads the masses. To apply the mass line means to seek out and learn from the ideas of the masses and to apply the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to concentrate what is correct in these ideas, distilling and synthesizing them into a more all-sided and correct reflection of reality and what must be done to change it. The party then takes this back to the masses in the form of line and policies, works to win the people to take these up, and unites with the masses to carry them out...summing up the results and then repeating the process. -- The RCP Draft Programme

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I have to say I'm pretty disappointed by how people on the Che Lives website responded to your re-post of my piece for AWIP. I had hoped for a thoughtful and helpful back and forth with RCP supporters on some issues that are of great concern to me. Instead, my comments were taken by a bunch of anti-communists as the basis to make incoherent and petty attacks on communism, the concept of the vanguard party, the RCP and Bob Avakian. While I obviously have my contradictions with the RCP, I have a lot of respect for the organization as a whole. I also have tremendous respect for Bob Avakian, even though I think the way in which they are promoting him these days makes it less likely rather than more likely that people will engage his work. In fact, I think that the RCP needs to learn more from Avakian, and that if it did so, some of the cultish elements of how he is promoted would disappear.

After reading the comments on Che Lives, I have to say that I think the moderators on AWIP were correct to delete my post, if that was the sort of stuff it was going to give rise to. I can't post on Che Lives, since I don't have an identity there, so please put my comments in the thread there.

I do appreciate your own thoughtful response to my post and your sympathy for my situation.

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A "good" personality should take the inevitability of human error into consideration when making their decisions.

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The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.-- Mao

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In the city of Shanghai, which was a stronghold of the Cultural Revolution, there was a mass uprising of more than a million people.

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So they had this mass upheaval in Shanghai, and in the initial stages, after they overthrew the old ruling committee in the city, they established for a brief time what was called the Shanghai Commune...And one of the things they did in the Paris Commune was that all officials were elected by direct popular vote, and could be recalled by direct expression of the masses in a popular referendum. And so they implemented policies of this kind in the Shanghai Commune, modeling themselves after the Paris Commune.

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Mao came forward with a statement that, under the circumstances, the Shanghai Commune was not the appropriate form in which to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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[Mao] said: "I'm afraid that this commune form is not strong enough to suppress counter-revolutionaries." And he also said, "What are we going to do about international relations -- what about all the ministers we have that are like the foreign minister, who is going to appoint the foreign minister? I'm afraid all these other countries wouldn't recognize the ministers that would be appointed in this way."

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If you have everybody taking part in these elections, directly choosing all the political representatives in that way, then bourgeois forces are going to come to dominate these elections, and we're going to get representatives of the bourgeoisie elected.

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Because people who ruled in the old society and people they link up who want to go back to the old society have tremendous advantages over the masses of people because of the inequalities that existed for centuries that the revolution was only beginning to address and overcome.

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...because you are not going to be able to free up everybody to spend the time that is necessary to go into these different realms and really learn to immerse themselves in these spheres and begin to master them.

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What Mao was saying is this: If you just have direct elections and direct recall of all officials, what you're going to have is a situation where people who have more facility with ideas and can articulate things better will come to dominate this process, or else you'll have people who don't know enough to actually deal in the realms that have to be dealt with to keep society going and keep the revolution going forward, and we'll lose it that way. So this is not a form we can adopt now.

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Instead, Mao proposed and popularized a form that...brought forward what were called revolutionary committees, which combined representatives of the masses with representatives of experts and party members in various forms to actually be the administrative body in all the different institutions...This is something that we can actually implement which will keep power in the hands of the masses of people...

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If we overstep that, then we're going to get thrown back -- back into the horror of the old society.

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