redFlags

Nine Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian's New Synthesis

Mike Ely, a life-long communist and former editor of the RCP's press, has released a major polemic on Avakian's supposed "New Synthesis" and the failures of the RCP to become a leading party of revolution in the USA. I'll hold off on my own commentary by way of introduction... but discussion has already taken off on Ely's new Kasama website. For anyone working to build a revolutionary movement in the United States, this is among the most thoughtful, engaged analyses you will find on such efforts over the last few decades. It is no "so long to all that" – rather, it is a call to begin the "audacious task". 

Download – Nine Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian's New Synthesis (PDF)

Finkelstein case: Urgent need to right wrongs at DePaul University

The following is an open letter from Prof. Bill Martin, a tenured professor of philosophy at DePaul University, site of the recent fight over Norman Finkelstein's tenure  and the very ability of intellectuals to engage in work that runs counter to the dominant politic.

"Two things that are very simple to understand need to be said up front. First, you cannot deny tenure to a professor because she or he takes a political stand that you do not like, agree with, or that is going to incur the disapprobation and wrath of some group. Yes, frankly, I think a professor who is an outright racist or misogynist or anti-gay bigot ought to be removed from the university (though even here there have to be procedures, and judgments cannot be based on whims, innuendo, or the self-promoting agendas of powerful persons or groups), but that is not what is going on here. Second, you cannot deny tenure to a professor simply for a rhetorical style that you do not like. A person cannot be denied tenure simply because you find his or her rhetoric 'inflammatory.'”

Akil Bomani's Authoring a Culture

Okay, so I confess that as a New Yorker, the fact that "Burningman" was an over-priced participatory arts orgy in the Nevada desert didn't quite register with my hard head. Every year, around this time, I get a surge of traffic from folks looking for information or reports on the Burningman festival. Haha! Bet you didn't see this one coming! I was just a man on fire... Adopting the Burningman pen name was only a play on the translation of my family name. In any case, I thought I'd post a link for ya'll burners to a scientific essay about the art of revolution. What does that mean?

Read it!

Up on the Mountain, Down on the Ground

By R. John
special to redFlags

Here's what I want to understand more deeply: this question of the "everyday" – the place, importance, meaning and political relevance of that “everyday” locus of human existence. What emerges from that vantage point for viewing and evaluating human existence? How important is specificity and how do we know that importance?

I remember during the civil rights struggle when white racists insisted that “outsiders” didn’t “understand” Mississippi, and had no right to denounce its long evolved local “ways.” Their slogan was seen on handcrafted signs as marchers came. “We live here, you suck,” one read. “States rights” after all defended jim crow (and before it slavery) under the banner of local rights (and even “self-determination”!)

 

I think it is the larger material coherence of society, that makes politics possible. You don’t have to know all the many particularities of each county or township, or else a Red Army couldn’t march through on a Long March liberating people, or enter Tibet with profound insights into the transformations needed there.

   

I start here: Some things can only be known well by direct experience. All knowledge has its roots in experience (however removed the specific practice and practitioners may be from those synthesizing that knowledge). But intimate contact with everyday life (and especially a close personal focus on the everyday in life) does not at all automatically or directly breed insight to the problems and solutions of that life.

"I do not recognize myself anymore"

Found poem.

"Actually, everything is quite clear if one thinks it over and reaches the conclusion that indirect democracy is a hoax.  Ostensibly, the elected Assembly is the one which reflects public opinion most faithfully.  But there is only one sort of public opinion, and it is serial. 

"The imbecility of the mass media, the government pronouncements, the biased or incomplete reporting in the newspapers -- all this comes to seek us out in our serial solitude and load us down with wooden ideas, formed out of what we think others will think.  Deep within us there are undoubtedly demands and protests, but because they are not echoed by others, they wither away and leave us with a 'bruised spirit' and a feeling of frustration.  So when we are called to vote, I, the Other, have my head stuffed with petrified ideas which the press or television has piled up there.  They are serial ideas which are expressed through my vote, but they are not my ideas. 

"The institutions of bourgeois democracy have split me apart:  there is me and there are all the Others they tell me I am (a Frenchman, a soldier, a worker, a taxpayer, a citizen, and so on).  This splitting-up forces us to live with what psychiatrists call a perpetual identity crisis.  Who am I, in the end?  An Other identical with all the others, inhabited by these impotent thoughts which come into being everywhere and are not actually thought anywhere?  Or am I myself?  And who is voting?  I do not recognize myself any more."

• —Jean-Paul Sartre's Elections, A Trap for Fools

Nazim Hikmet: On Living

Living is no laughing matter :
you must live with great seriousness
                           like a squirrel, for example -
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
                           I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter :
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                     your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory,
    in your white coat and safety glasses,
    you can die for people -
     even for people whose faces you have never seen,
     even though you know living
     is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -
and not for your children, either
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
                     because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

More poetry from Nazim Hikmet

U.S. Imperialism, Islamic Fundamentalism… and the Need for Another Way

by Sunsara Taylor, Revolution

As the U.S.'s crimes against humanity in the Middle East mount, it is of tremendous importance for people in the U.S. to honestly confront and rise to the profound challenges and responsibilities before us in bringing this to a halt. In this spirit, I welcomed the argument made by Hadas Thier and Aaron Hess in the Socialist Worker on April 20, 2007 entitled Standing up to Islamophobia, even while I find their central arguments to not only be wrong, but harmful.

I do not doubt that Thier and Hess want to oppose U.S. wars of aggression and their accompanying assault on Muslims, Arabs and South Asians living in the U. S. But they end up arguing for an approach that will neither meet the actual challenges of opposing the U.S. “crusade,” nor bring forward new, truly liberating possibilities here and around the world. They end up in this unfortunate place through the use of bad logic, flawed methodology, and a duck-from-unpleasant-realities epistemology (method for arriving at what is true).

Class Instinct?

In a comment on Avakian's Three Alternative Worlds, which was the most widely distributed radical essay at the recent antiwar march in Washington, Zamora posed a question that opens a few lines of discussion on what she calls "class instinct". Maybe I'm old fashioned for thinking in terms of "class consciousness", but the underlying questions of what materialism is, the nature of leadership, the role of passion, and the relationship between identity and solidarity are a lot to unpack. Zamora writes:

In my own communist training, and in conversations with fellow communists, I have always understood ‘class instinct’ or ‘class feelings’ to play some sort of indeterminate role in the formation of a class stand that allows us to apply our scientific method in the interests of the proletariat and not, as many have done, in the service of just understanding the world better and perhaps furthering their own personal interests in the process.

Class feelings has never been understood, in the context I have encountered it as a revolutionary communist, as a ‘Jimmy Higgins’ type attitude. Rather, I have understood it as the sort of feelings and emotions that lead us, even in many cases before gaining our broader understanding of MLM and world history, and then deepened on the basis of that understanding, to oppose the police and to oppose the various crimes and wars of imperialism. That somehow, there is this visceral, emotional component to our understanding that allows us to make sacrifices and to wield the classless knowledge (i.e., truth that, as truth, has no class character per se) for a partisan class cause.

And yet, I can’t but feel a little uncomfortable with that.

Capitalism, Revisionism & Revolution: Avakian's "Three Alternative Worlds"

The Bob Avakian Show continues full steam. In the latest edition of Revolution, the publication of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, they've printed a transcript of a talk that opens up the question of agency and socialism. What is, after all the difference between a social-welfare state and socialism as the dictatorship of the proletariat?

For the generations coming up with no living memory of 20th Century socialism and reared on the (neo-Conservative) end of history narrative, it's worth digging into how revolutionary communism developed in opposition to the welfare/police state model of "socialism" that was unfortunately not just a cariacture.

It's not just the ruling class and its courtiers that want to equate revisionism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, it's also every shade of opportunist you can imagine. Anything that turns the specter of the future into the ghost of the past...

"...the rights of the people cannot be reduced to the right to have a job and earn an income, as basic as that is. There is the question of are we really going to transform society so that in every respect, not only economically but socially, politically, ideologically, and culturally, it really is superior to capitalist society. A society that not only meets the needs of the masses of people, but really is characterized increasingly by the conscious expression and initiative of the masses of people."

Anyone with links to other leaders discussing this kind of vision, I'm all ears.

Workers Party of Belgium: Pageantry, Parliaments & Uncle Joe

By way of Jimmy Higgins from Fire on the Mountain, this report about the recent growth of the Workers Party of Belgium (PTB) is interesting on a few counts. The PTB has been the center of international gatherings to re-form the international communist movement on the conflation of revisionism and Marxism-Leninism, promoting left Stalinism against MLM. At the same time, they have grown from the "biggest of the small parties" to the "smallest of the big" in the Belgian parliament and local electoral lists. Running a high-profile campaign in her district and of mixed immigrant/European family, Miss Brussels Halima Chehaima came in second promoting the PTB platform. Cuts a better profile than Uncle Joe, but what of this program they run, what of their international profile, of shop stewards vs. tribunes of the people? What of syncretism vs. synthesis?

Maybe this is a good time to have a discussion about the Old Synthesis.

The full report is here on the link.