Carl Dix: 50 Reasons

Comments

[Eric]

Man, I love this

[earl the pearl]

I wish I could dig Carl Dix more,but something tells me he's more intersted in selling Bob Avakian Cds than in Black liberation.
That might sound like a cheap shot and it is (pardon me I'm writing with only 4 hours sleep.) Nevertheless, it was really funny to look at the RC4 tour and feel like damn... What could have been?
This was billed to be an organizing effort among Black folks,something that hasn't been seen in the radical/communist left in a systematic way in a number of years. But whats up with the first demand being following white leadership? I always get this sense with the RCP that the bar is three times higher for Black folks? If you are a rev.nationalists, or anything other than an Avakianite you get criticized ruthlessly. But still, there isn't that threshold in WCW where the RCP works with progressive dems.
Anyway, this is to say I like Dix's rap, but I wonder how he can back it up...

[JB]

I've never heard the "demand to follow white leadership" ever in my life... except as a "cheap shot" from people who dismiss any multi-racial organizing efforts as "white".

It's kind of hard not to notice that Carl is one of the main leaders of the RCP, but I guess since he doesn't apply the Francis Cress Wessling test to his politics, he must be shucking and jiving.

Ruthlessly criticizing Black nationalism? Sure... you think a black nation is forming as a separate state? You think that's a good idea?

The RCP supports the right to African-American self-determination, including through a national plebescite.

Hardly common currency.

Earl "gets the sense" the bar is "three times higher" – well, based on what?

Maybe the "bar" is too high for everyone concerned... maybe not.

But we've seen ample evidence for the destructive effect that identity politics has had on the left. Not just in regards to nationality, but all around. The very idea that we have a common struggle is controversial, but without it we are sunk.

If you agree with what the comrade is saying, then the responsibility is on you to take it higher. Waiting for the party to "finally" deliver a neat package of perfection is a like waiting for the second coming.

We get the world we make.

[Pablo]

DAAAAAMN! JB's got that crazy shit!
Seriously, I appreciate his response here, as always. More people on the left and rev. nationalists should be engaging this and what Carl's putting out, while letting go of their preconceived notions. I think it would blow their minds. Should people have refused on principle to follow Mao in the early years of the Chinese revolution based on the fact that he was from a middle peasant family from a certain locality in China? I know it's important to continue the conversation about identity politics vs. the "white chairman" line but sometimes it gets so fucking boring and limiting. We have a ruling class to go up against and we don't have eternity to get the job done. Who's got which program, and where does their line objectively lead? Where do we want to go and which forces are ready and capable of taking us there? Refusing to address this by now is like playing around with toys in a sandbox as far as I'm concerned: insular and amateurish. Let's grow up a bit.
Plus RCP works with all kinds of people on various levels, so what is this Earl person talking about? Clergy and religious people, small business people, professors and project-dwellers, 99 percent of whom are not (yet) MLM-ists. The bar is *slightly* higher for joining the vanguard, as it should be. The Party has full confidence that people can break with the various bourg. ideologies that the system has them trained in and become revolutionary communists, i.e. internationalists and emancipators of humanity, no matter their background. A lot more inspiring than the myriad political trends who insist the masses can't or shouldn't be struggled with to do this. Just peep the recent obituaries in Revolution for comrades who came forward on that basis (like Mobil and Billy Ellis) and ask yourself if having tens of thousands more like them wouldn't make a difference in today's situation.

[Kazembe]

I think this is an important discussion to have because often times the national question gets swept under the rug and revived only under times of distress (i.e.-Katrina, Sean Bell, Florida 2000, etc.)

What is the national question? Black people were enslaved and their unpaid labor underpinned the economic basis of imperialism. Indeed, the first Africans sold were not in Jamestown, but at the foot of Wall Street of then New Amsterdam.
Throughout the history of this country, Black people continued to act as a bastion of free and cheap labor, regulated through Black codes, Klan terror and later Jim Crow segregation. All attempts to integrate themselves into this society, including the building of separate Black towns and participation into the legal processes were meet with violence. For example, those who say that Black people should pull themselves by their bootstraps seem to forget how white citizens burned down the towns of Rosewood and Tulsa.
Under this tremendous pressure and segregation, a new people were formed. Black people do not constitute only a race but a nation. The entire underpinning of the national question is this: Do Black people have a right to separate from this country? What is the national destiny of Black people?

This question cannot be answered by fiat, but by struggle and will not be resolved under the current system of capitalism.

Yet, an organization's response to the national question girds their work. Are Black people a nation facing national oppression or are we facing simply class oppression?
Answering this question determines whether an organization believes it is important for Black people to have the right to form seperate formations (i.e.-Black liberation caucuses, committees, or mass organizations.)

I appreciate Carl's work and the RCP position post-Katrina (And I think "Cold Liberating Truth" is the best document out there in terms of understanding Black oppression) And yet, I feel both in my own experiences and reading the responses to Earl above, that their is a strong class reduction strand in understanding the nature of Black oppression. Like Earl, I was excited about the RC4 tour. But I was disappointed by the primary focus on following Avakian. I don’t think that should have been the basis of unity. I think the basis of unity should have been Black people fighting against imperialism and racism, and a building a Black rev. organization.
By putting Avakian first it forced a lot of people who would have come forward from doing so. Why? In my case, I am not interested in following white leadership. While I respect my white comrades and I struggle with them there is a strong part of me that feels that they too benefit from the system.

JB and Pablo mention "identity politics" in denouncing Earl. Using "identity politics" is a cheap way of avoiding dealing with how white people (of all classes) benefit from Black oppression. No one of the writers above mention this clear fact. And this fact is not absolved through saying one is a communist like Avakian believes. Whether you are a communist or not does take you out of the mix of this system. In bringing people forward I think it’s important for white comrades to not to see Black people’s reaction to their oppression as the problem, but to see their own mores in terms of privelege as an additional site of struggle.

[Renegade Eye]

This type of dialog has been going on as long as there have been communists.

The group that should be talked about in discussions like this, is the Democratic Party. The party that destroyed the welfare system. That heinous act was done by the so called "black president".

I was shocked to find out that the "Great Flint Strike" in the 1930s, was a Jim Crow strike.

[r. john]

let's dig into Kazimbe's arguments:

"The entire underpinning of the national question is this: Do Black people have a right to separate from this country? What is the national destiny of Black people?"

Is this true? Is independence and the right to national self-determination really "the entire underpinning" of the Black national question.

Or is a single multinational socialist state a better and preferable road to the liberation of Black people (and a better condition for contributing to the emancipation of humanity as a whole)?

And what is the role of socialism and communism in overthrowing the "underpinnings" of Black national oppression?

More....

"In my case, I am not interested in following white leadership. While I respect my white comrades and I struggle with them there is a strong part of me that feels that they too benefit from the system."

Questions:

If the leadership of a communist revolution is a white person, is this "white leadership" or communist leadership?

What are the implications of seeing the actions and line of ANY white person as "white leadership"?

Does the fact that white people (as a group) benefit from the system, mean that this intrinsically compromises the insight and leadership of ANY white person?

Is the link between nationality status and consciousness that linear and fixed?

To be provocative: viewed from a world scale, do African-American people in the U.S. have some "benefits" from this system (relative to say people of Mali)?

Does this affect all African American people's ability to provide communist leadership?

Is the key to correct leadership finding someone who has never benefited from what we are trying to overthrow?

Or is leadership a matter of consciousness, that is relatively independent from class and national origin?

Is revolution at its basis about self-determination? Or is it about overturning the four alls? And what does this say about the need for communist leadership (independent of the color or nationality of the particular leaders.)

If a white medical researcher came up with a cure for sickle cell anemia, would it be correct to reject the cure because it came from someone who (on some level, and to some degree) could be said to have benefited from white supremacy? Is there any valid analogy here to the scientific process of finding the road to the emancipation of Black people?

Is the essense of communist leadership to create the conditions for self determination -- or is it to scientifically chart the ways to connect us (where we are now) to the final goal of communism (in all the stages and complexity of that global process)?

I'm sure there are more quesstions to dig into.... but that's just a start.

[r. john]

sorry for the initial typo in your name, Kazembe.

[Christopher Day]

r. john asks "If the leadership of a communist revolution is a white person, is this 'white leadership' or communist leadership?"

Posing the question this way is really a mechanical approach to the problem and I think ultimately a refusal to take seriously the issues that Kazembe raises and that many many others share.

Because of the history of the United States I would argue that the leadership of any genuine revolutionary vanguard party MUST be collective and multi-racial and that such an organization must be deeply rooted in the major oppressed nationalities of the U.S., in particular among Black folk.

Any organization that is not able to meet these criteria is not really a revolutionary vanguard party. It may have a valuable role to play in bringing such a vanguard into existence, but in order to do so it must be frank about its limitations here.

This is one important reason why the relentless insistence on the singular importance of Avakian is so problematic -- it seems to foreclose in advance the possibility of precisely the sort of leadership that a communist revolution in the United States demands.

I'm not saying a revolutionary party in the U.S. CAN'T have a white chairman. But rather that before a formation claims to be a party that it must have an overall leadership that reflects real roots in the historically most rebellious sectors of the people -- namely oppressed nationalities. If such a party were to choose a white man as chairman, understanding the baggage that carries, that would be compelling testimony to his capacities as a revolutionary leader. But thats not what we are talking about.

The RCP was founded after the FAILURE of an attempt to unite several of the different oppressed nationality-based communist organizations with the mainly white Revolutionary Union led by Avakian. The result was an organization that largely reflected the national composition of the RU. Now we can re-hash the arguments over why that effort failed, but it DID fail. And the fact of the resulting composition of the RCP, more importantly than its numbers, is at the heart of why I feel compelled to regard it as a propaganda organization and not the party it claims to be and why I find its self-designation so problematic even where I respect its accomplishments as a propaganda organization.

By claiming to be a party when it is in fact still largely a propaganda organization, the RCP makes the neccesary formation of a party more difficult. Particularly given its national composition this assertion, combined with the VERY heavy promotion of Avakian, reproduces longstanding patterns of white arrogance that undoubtedly drive many people of color away from the the RCP despite the appeal of much of the rest of what they have to say.

I think its good to struggle with people to value revolutionary leadership regardless of the color of the person it comes from, including having a white chairman if that is how things turn out. But understanding that doesn't automatically eliminate the problems that exist around the particular claim being made for Avakian and the RCP. Stated simply, for an organization with the history that the RCP has to lay claim to being the vanguard party of the U.S. proletariat means -- at a minimum -- making some real breakthroughs in its national composition, of which, frankly, I have not seen evidence.

[jibaro]

I'm not saying that the issues you are discussing aren't important.

But.... there are complaints that EVERY DISCUSSION is turned into THAT discussion.

Can't we talk about Kazembe's issue:

That Black liberation is national self-determination, and therefore the key issue is self-organization (and that it requires independence from something he calls "white leadership.")

Clearly all your points are relevent (since the leader of the c. revolution is "white" -- objectively.) But your response really did not deal with those important issues around the national question... right?

[jibaro]

chris wrote: "I think its good to struggle with people to value revolutionary leadership regardless of the color of the person it comes from, including having a white chairman if that is how things turn out. But understanding that doesn't automatically eliminate the problems that exist around the particular claim being made for Avakian and the RCP."

Lets discuss the first sentence in this thread.

And why don't you post your discussion of the second sentence on ITS thread?

[Christopher Day]

Jibaro wants to separate the discussions of the two points I made in separate threads. But his parenthetical comment "(since the leader of the c. revolution is "white" -- objectively)" makes that impossible because it links the question of principle here with the empirical question of the vanguard status of the RCP and Avakian. It is not settled science that Bob Avakian is "the leader of the c. revolution" and pretending that it is is part of the reason why these discussions become broken records.

People go to the RC4 events hungry for discussion of the question of the relation between Black liberation and national liberation and they come away feeling disrespected when the speakers make Avakian the centerpiece. You can't run a practice like that and then get pissed when "EVERY DISCUSSION is turned into THAT discussion." The RCP has decided that insisting that it is the vanguard party and promoting Avakian are central tasks.

I'd appreciate a serious discussion of the Black national question here as much as the next person. But this is a forum where the RCP POV gets considerable airing and I think its silly to pretend that the history and practice of the RCP around the national question are irrelevant to a discussion of a Carl Dix video.

[r. john]

Well, chris, important as the entwined issues are.... we have not gotten into the issues expressed in Kazembe's post.

My impression is that similar assumptions are expressed in your post when you say, "People go to the RC4 events hungry for discussion of the question of the relation between Black liberation and national liberation and they come away feeling disrespected when the speakers make Avakian the centerpiece."

I think people come to the revolutionary movement hungry for a way out of the madness and oppression. I don't know what the "relation between Black liberation and national liberation" means exactly -- but part of the complexity of this national question is that national liberation is entwined with socialist revolution (and the larger global communist revolution).

I think you are projecting with your assumptions of "feeling disrespected" -- yes, multinational organization goes against the grain of nationalist assumptions. But nationalist assumptions are hardly universal.

Inclinations toward INTERnationalism are certainly a sign of the genuinely advanced (especially in a situation where nationalist sentiments often incline toward real hostilities of Korean merchants and Mexican immigrants arriving in the U.S. -- or incline toward softness toward such reactionary hostilities.)

National liberation does not require nationalist ideology or worldview -- on the contrary the "do for self" outlook (which concentrates "bourgeois right") will not lead to liberation. In the world generally, and in the U.S. in particular, genuine national liberation requires communist and international leadership -- because of the way the national question of our era is bound up with the whole larger process of transition to communism.

There is tremendous propaganda being made for the idea that liberation comes from "positive role models," self reliance, serving yourself, getting your piece of the pie etc. -- so that it may not be surprising if some judge movements by those standards ("I would prefer a black woman leader" -- as if communist leaders of this caliber emerge on a rack at the GAP, and you go and pick which color and cut you prefer from a half dozen different styles.)

Let's dig into Kazembe's points... I think there is a lot there.

[Christopher Day]

I wasn't "projecting." I was referring to Earl's post.

[Chuck Morse]

Incidentally, how many members does the RCP have and what is the approximate ethnic breakdown of the membership? Certainly any group that purports to lead the masses should be transparent about these things. Also, why don’t RCP members elect the RCP leadership?

[Christopher Day]

Chuck,
Apropos another thread, what do you think the EZLN would say if you asked them those questions? I mean, really.

[Hassoun]

"Incidentally, how many members does the RCP have and what is the approximate ethnic breakdown of the membership? Certainly any group that purports to lead the masses should be transparent about these things. Also, why don’t RCP members elect the RCP leadership?"
Posted by: Chuck Morse March 12, 2007

Certainly not. Any serious organisation who did that is the most naive and irresponsible in protecting itself and the masses. Democratic sensibilities of certain kind can be lethal.
Might as well lodge a list of members with the "apropriate authorities" and invite them to oversee our leadership elections to give us the democratic seal of approval. Once again any illusion or lack of clarity on this is lethal.
Whilst an organisation has to have rules and regulations that should reflect DC, one should not be totally transparent on how and when its carried out. The reasons for this should be popularised so that the other side, our democratic rulers, can't use this misrepresentation against us.
How do you and I know that they, the RCP, did not elect their leaders?
If you were a general in a war would you report your exact number of troops and their formation while the battle is raging?
Hassoun.

[Chuck Morse]

It sounds like you're saying that anyone asking for basic organizational transparency is a counter-revolutionary threatening communists with death. Is that what you're saying? Do you believe that democracy equals right wing terror?

[Christopher Day]

No, Chuck, I'm saying that U.S. imperialism takes an active interest in crushing its enemies and that organizations that have as their objective the revolutionary overthrow of any government have good reason to keep information like what you asked for secret, and that you should know this by now. "Transparency" in a revolutionary organization is a death sentence. There is an inherent contradiction between the conditions of struggle under this system and ideal forms of open democracy. It is therefore important, as Hassoun notes, to popularize an understanding of the reasons revolutionary organizations can't function like a New England town meeting.

[Chuck Morse]

Chris, my questions were directed to Hassoun not you, but it sounds like you two hold the same views anyway. ... And aren’t you the Blanquist!

Your emphasis on secrecy would make sense if the military struggle against the present order were the central priority, but it cannot be when things like nuclear weapons are involved. The battle will have to take place overwhelmingly on a political—not military—plane. As such, things like transparency, accountability, and all the other attributes of democracy are of paramount importance

[r. john]

i think there are two things involved in democratic centralism:

first is the fact that this is a class struggle with a vicious, ruthless enemy, whose whole history is wracked with a decapitation strategy (and even their attacks on the people are tied to "dry up the sea to catch the fish.") They exploit the people, but to do that they kill the conscious and organized forces (and especially their leaders).

So for that reason transparency is either a declaration that you don't intend to be a fundamental challenge, or else it is monumentally stupid. Either way it is a confession of "i'm not serious."

The second level is also important: epistemologically. You don't get truth by votes. A vanguard party doesn't "belong to its mebership" -- it is about the emancipation of humanity, not "obeying" the political views and inclinations of its basic membership.

Many many times in the history of every party we would consider important, their leadership had to act against the inclinations (and will) of their membershi- -- fighting to win over their own party to what needed to be done, often against fiercely powerful opposing lines. I don't just think that is ironic, i suspect it is inherent in the process of doing sumthing as wrenching and complex as revolution. And it has to do with the real differences between the leadership and the led. The relatioinship is complex, of course, and certainly important things can be known, developed, invovated, discovered and fought for at all levels of the organization. And so democratic centralism has a "chain of knowledge and a chain of command."

But it is important to understand that the key decisions and line questions of revolution are matters of struggle and strategic overview, not votes.

I have heard people say "accountability" (lifted straight from the illusions taught in highschool civics.) Well, who are we accountable to? Is the leadership of a communist party "accountable" to its membership and their views? Or to the people of the world and the people of the future?

The analogy to an army is quite important: If you were to vote on every offensive and advance -- you would lose.

I don't know any details about how various vanguard parties "pick" their leaders -- but I can't imagine it is done by vote of the membership (or that it should be!)

For both reasons:

1) Such votes would mean that the leaders would need to be known, and not just their identities but their histories, their shades of political differences, their disputes etc. All of which would be directly in the hands of the death squads and cointelpro, sooner or later, and would dampen the ability to create a collective leadership that fought out its differences in a principled and protracted and non-liberal way.

And secondarily, I don't think (epistemologically) that the rank-and-file could or should decided who is best suited for the top leadership -- leadership of a body is best decided by that body.

If you think through the assumptions of all this (and I won't comment on Chucks shocked response to the very idea that "democracy equals death" under these conditions! Oh no! what a shocking idea! How quickly that idea can be dismissed without a thought and a shudder -- by those who are not serious.)

Are we about process or about real liberation?

Are we about jealously guarding the rights and "imput" of self -- or straining to be emancipaters of humanity?

[r. john]

"Incidentally, how many members does the RCP have and what is the approximate ethnic breakdown of the membership?"

The answer to this question is clearly:

"Those who know don't say, those who say don't know."

"Certainly any group that purports to lead the masses should be transparent about these things."

No, on the contrary, no group would be fullfilling its oblications as a vanguard if it was "transparent about these things."

[LeftyHenry]

"I wish I could dig Carl Dix more,but something tells me he's more intersted in selling Bob Avakian Cds than in Black liberation."

This is a very narrow statement. There is a reason why the RCP promotes Avakian's works. That reason is that he is the leader of the RCP and he puts forward a solid line for revolution. In alot of his works, he deals with questions such as the question of black self-determination.

Black Liberation is an important part of the RCP line, and the RCP line is what RCP members and supporters promote

[r. john]

black liberaton is not the same as "self-determination."

Revolution is not the same as "self-determination."

This is actually at the heart of the questions we are grappling with here -- between communism and anarchism.

There is a complex and not a linear relationship between the two.

And actually, Avakian has unraveled this element in the struggle for Black liberation.... in an unprecedented way. And getting into how he "deals with it" underscores HOW the liberation process moves ahead, and HOW masses emancipate themselves (and what it means for the conscious to step forward as "emancipators of humanity") -- and what the relationship is between "emancipate yourself" and "emancipate humanity" (even when "yourself" is writ large as your gender, or your nation, or your community, or your second of workers, or your class, or your family... or your SELF in the narrowest self.)

The talk on why the communist approach is not "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" -- has been profound and very provocative for me.

[Come Down to Earth]

"No, Chuck, I'm saying that U.S. imperialism takes an active interest in crushing its enemies and that organizations that have as their objective the revolutionary overthrow of any government have good reason to keep information like what you asked for secret, and that you should know this by now. "Transparency" in a revolutionary organization is a death sentence."

Uhhh...Chris what year and country do you think this is? 1942 Poland? 1982 El Salvador? Maybye even 1931 Mississippi? I mean do you really think the leaders "US imperialism"(which ones, the White House, congress, the Council on foreign relations") are interested in crushing small left-wing sects?
Join the real world and leave behind toy-town Bolshevism.