WHAT IS BOB AVAKIANS THEORY? None of what Im about to say should be read as a statement of agreement with Bob Avakians theory, Personally, I find a lot of its aspects very arbitrary. Im posting this purely for educational purposes. There seems to be a lot of ignorance when it comes to what BAs theory actually is because any discussion thereof invariably winds up getting overshadowed by a dismissive discussion instead of the Revolutionary Communist Partys policy of tactically building a personality cult around BA. The RCPs choice of tactics is just that. It is not the heart and soul of BAs theory itself. The fact that the RCP has had a tendency to speak in Avakianese (which basically means in subjective, run-on sentences) rather than English, including when describing their line, hasnt helped matters. For the sake of everyones clarity, allow to me to translate BAs theory into English so that its distinctions might be understood by the average communist: DISTINCTION 1:METHODOLOGY NAMELY: NO MASS LINE The RCPs politics come out of the Maoist tradition, but are distinguished from that tradition in no stronger way than this. Maos mass line is a dialectical fusion of Lenin’s vanguardism on the one hand and populism (as in to say a majoritarian orientation) on the other. It seeks to combine objective, academic analysis and Marxist leadership with a large dose of the experiential, subjective factor: the experiences and perspectives of the masses. It combines leading the masses with being led by the masses in a dialectical (that is, a back-and-forth) way. The idea is that you gather the views of the masses, learn from them, and fight for what they’re willing to fight for at every step in conjunction with bringing them our Marxian perspective on things in order to win them over to the goal of communism. Humble leadership might be a good way of summing all this up. Revolution as a mass action, not the act of an “enlightened” minority. Bob Avakians theory jettisons this method and approach in favor of what BA likes to call solid core with a lot of elasticity, and what I, for simplicitys sake, prefer to call structured open-mindedness. Essentially this amounts to revisiting a more academic-leaning approach to the gathering of knowledge. However, it is more open-minded than the traditional Leninist approach in that, like the critical theorists, it embraces all the scientific fields and listens to the voices of anti-communists (at least if theyre academics anyway), not just progressives. The history behind this divergence from the mass line is to be found in BAs writings from the early 1980s surmising that the mass line may not be applicable in country like the United States where the majority are not naturally progressive in their outlook and orientation. Thats how far back it goes, at least in BAs mind. Nonetheless failing to write off bourgeois nations like the United States, it was ultimately decided that this new method and approach is superior to the mass line and universally applicable. DISTINCTION 2: STRATEGY NAMELY: UNIVERSALITY OF PEOPLES WAR Well okay, the RCP prefers not to use the term peoples war to describe a protracted guerrilla war that aims at seizing state power and using it to reorganize society along socialist lines toward the eventual goal of realizing communism as long as that said war takes place in an urban setting and involves a subjectively-defined period of organizing revolutionary forces, but yeah objectively thats pretty much the textbook definition of protracted peoples war, but just adapted to an urban setting. Anyway, the distinction between this and the traditional Maoist line is that the traditional Maoist line called for revolution by way of peoples war in oppressed countries and revolution by way of urban insurrection (a la the October Revolution) in imperialist countries. BAs theory jettisons that nuanced approach in favor of seeing the October Revolution as an historical aberration that couldnt plausibly be repeated again anywhere. So anyway, with that understood, the RCP considers itself to be in the early stages of preparing the ground for the launching of a protracted guerrilla war for state power here in the United States. Of course...yeah its kind of hard to imagine that theyll ever actually reach the other side of that said preparation period, but hey, maybe thats just my pessimism speaking. Or my analysis of the class composition of the nation, one of the two. Dont get me wrong: In spite of my belief that the RCPs line is rather naive, I like much of the actual political activism they do. Im definitely supportive of Stop Patriarchy and Stop Mass Incarceration!, both. I just dont think theyre leading directly to the emergence a revolutionary situation in the United States like the RCP does. DISTINCTION 3: SOCIETY UNDER SOCIALISM NAMELY: SEMI-LIBERALISM AND EXTREME INTERNATIONALISM The RCP now believes that a future socialist society should have meaningful, contested elections and that the party itself should only be legally guaranteed about one-third of all national political offices. In further efforts to appease liberal critics of 20th century communism, anti-communists are to be allowed to voice their opinions as well in a future socialist America so long as they dont actually take up arms against the government. Okay yeah, Im liberal enough to admit that I think these are both good ideas and that Id take them even further. The RCP also now believes that foreign policy should be front and center under socialism, with the bulk of state funds going to develop and support communist revolutions in other countries. This idea is based upon the expand or die reasoning you may be familiar with: that socialism must not only be continually developed (as in revolutionized) in the given country lest it face certain defeat, but that it must also be continually expanding its reach as a world system in order to avoid eventual collapse. I find these defeatist theories symptomatic of embracing inferior forms of socialism that simply arent as productive as capitalism, personally, but Ive explained all that on my blog. So anyway, there you have it: a brief, general overview of the core of Bob Avakians theory written in English (and with bonus discouraging witticisms included). Hope youve gotten something out of it.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 22:23:05 +0000
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