I mentioned my support of RF in a post, and the sole response I got was questioning whether I was "recruiting for the RCP." Wow, zero to 60 in .05 seconds. I am not a recruiter, just saying look at RF's message, look what they are trying to accomplish right now: getting rid of Trump, when there is no question that is what our species needs. I asked my accuser, do you think the anti Trump movement in general would be stronger without RF, or the RCP? I got no real response to that, just the bizarre accusation that I would not stop talking about the RCP. (?) Puzzling to say the least. These people are out there, with their buttons ready to be pushed, activating their spring loaded purity tests. What a source of frustration. I am way more to the left than almost all of them, however I am willing to be thoughtfully inclusive of their aims, especially now. Strength in numbers is needed today, and we can defeat Trumpism first, then the holier than thou types can get back to talking about defeating Bob Avakian's imaginary "cult." Why would they even fucking care? It ain't gonna matter that you don't like the RCP, not for a very dark and painfully long period, if you can't support what RF is trying to accomplish now. Negative opinions directed at RF - an urgently valuable group if you ask me - will soon be proven to have been useless if everyone to the left of Stephen Miller is locked up in a Texas megacamp. Come together... right now...
Strong piece on the strategic blindspot plaguing anti-Trump organizing. Your point about speakers avoiding regime removal while crowds privately acknowledge its necessity captures somethign I've noticed at local actions too. The irony is that attacking RF for Avakian connections becomes its own distraction from building the mass movement everyone claims to want. I've watched smaller orgs spend more energy on ideological gatekeeping than actual mobilization. The medical analogies work well here - you dont wait for stage 4 to call something cancer. If Peisner and RS have better strategies for removal they should articulate them rather than just tearing down groups actualy doing the work.
The "left" and "Marxist" haters sometimes get to so bad that this happened at one point last year: I went to a Bernie-ish labor-led and progressive event in College Town USA (IC) and politely handed out an excellent RF flyer on the need for the people to drive out the fascist Trump regime before it's too late. This lady with whom I had just had a very nice conversation came up to me looking very concerned and pointed at a local malicious "Trotskyist" (initials CC) standing in the background. He had told her and others that I was a "nefarious Maoist and cult member." I told her I had a great deal of respect for the Chinese Revolution of 1949-1976 and why, assured her that I was not in a cult. I held back from informing her that CC was mentally ill and moved from one split off faction to another every year or so. Knowing nothing about such things, the poor woman just looked confused. The hater CC had done his demented job and the lady returned to hearing about how unions held people out and that maybe we can vote Trump out in three and half years.
Paul Street's passionate and thoughtful article which credits Bob Avakian for his long years of service and excellent radical analysis seems to have triggered flashbacks in some of his older readers. I can relate to that. I remember when I was a mailman in Maywood, Illinois in the seventies, I used to play basketball at a public park that we thought should be renamed for Chairman Fred. Most of the other players were black but sometimes an older white guy named Bob would show up and play an authentic and physical full court game which the black players all seemed to respect. Later in the decade when I moved to California and worked as a mailman in Berkeley I decided to finish college. I remember taking a required English course with a good professor who assigned a book of Rolling Stone magazine articles which he used to trash as examples of bad writing because of their narrow perspective and stupid version of the history of rock and roll as opposed to Ways of Seeing by John Berger. I appreciated it when the local Revcoms staged a demonstration by unfurling an anti-capitalism banner in my Berkeley Economics class which infuriated the liberal professor. No, I do not suffer from Avakian Derangement Syndrome. I like RCP activism, concise radical pamphlets, creative political signs and much more. I detest sneaky anti-communist attacks by the left liberal gatekeepers who serve the controlled inauthentic opposition to US fascism.
My aunt Viona (Ony) Luhtala was a teacher and later principal in the main elementary school in Maywood in the 1950s and 1960s. It's quite possible she taught Fred Hampton as a grade schooler or was the principal of his school. My father or mother told me a story about Ony: she took a busload of students down to Springfield, IL to see the Abe Lincoln historical site(s). The people running the site(s) wouldn't let the Black students in until she threatened to call the Chicago newspapers about their racism. I used to spend a day in her school as a kid in different years in the mid-late 1960s and the change from white to majority Black was quite dramatic and fast.
Great stories! Yeah Avakian is a hoops guy. I used to be addicted to pick up basketball...didn't think anything else mattered for a couple of years.. Rolling Stone has had some nasty history.
Rolling Stone commodifies culture. It will not present analyses of the underlying economic systems providing its sustenance. It’s not like they sat down and a directive was issued. It’s just not what Rolling Stone is about.
I would suggest you add Vijay Pershad to your references. Very helpful analysis especially regarding the difficulty involved in confronting the system not just Trump.
BTW one of the standard things that is done by old time lefties with ADS (Avakian Derangement Syndrome) is to bring up things from literally half a century ago (!). (Shall I tell you what I was doing in 1975? Stealing and crashing cars while wasted on weed, Schlitz and Jim Beam.) So, for example, one hears from them about ancient lousy Avakian and RCP positions on the Boston school busing program and on homosexuality without hearing that Avakian and the RCP self-critically rejected and reversed their original mistaken positions on those issues. Or that much of the left at the time had F'd positions on those and other things. Now here Peter you aren't even talking about the RCP, you are talking about the October League, which BTW ended up becoming a big enemy of Avakian's over the nature of post-Mao China and other things...stuff you of course don't know about because ADS and RevcomDS frankly mean not doing any remotely serious research prior to statements on Avakian and the RCP. Given the ADS proscription against actually reading Avakian, you are unaware that Avakian has numerous serious criticisms of Mao and that it is at this date pretty absurd to call him a Maoist given big changes in the world since 1976 - changes like most of the world's impoverished population now living in giant sprawling cities (as detailed in Mike Davis's Planet of Slums). ADS means you feel entitled to blurt out "Maoist cultism," as you remember it from 1970-something....in 2026! I'm sorry you had to hear an OL member take a genocidal position on Trotskysists. That position strikes me as quite extreme! :) I was a goofy Trotskyist geek for ten years one summer and still feel a chill at the sectarian groupthink that was expected of me; it was awful. Besides that (and I was a big fan of Leon's history of the Russian Revolution and his writings on German fascism and still think they merit reading) what did it for me with that tendency and its endless split offs was its absurd hostility to actual revolutions and people's movement outside the classic Western proletarian model -- and the related really bad dismissive faux-revolutionary takes on racial and gender oppression. I will add that the Trot World Socialist Web Site has properly understood Trump and Trumpism as fascist pretty much from the start (good for them!) but does so in a very white male way that is very deficient on the central significance of racial oppression/white supremacism and militant patriarchy. I don't blame the SEP's white male leaders' identity. It is rather a theoretical and epistemological problem (Actually that was my impression during Trump45 -- maybe they got better?). Anyway there's more to say but I think the best thing would be to read some of the serious Revcom and Avakian stuff so you can even know what I'm talking about.
I often find the common left and liberal response to the mere mention of big bad Bob Avakian to be darkly comedic. I myself have been conditioned by ADS to mention him somewhat sparingly just because of the weird snark- and shit-storm that can ensue from mentioning him and his work. 😂 I've cited and quoted Chomsky millions of time to great approval and in all honesty that's not just cuz of the great critiques he's done of US imperialism; it's also he makes no serious revolutionary challenge to the system and really says very little on what is to be done, foolishly claiming that doing so is reactionary and authoritarian. NC like Sanders and unlike Avakian really missed the boat on Trumpism as fascism, which is related to being reductionist and clueless on dialectical materialism ...but I digress.
I suspect Peisner tried to use his request to interview Avakian being rebuffed, as another club to attack Avakian and the RevComs with.
It’s as if he has zero historical awareness or care about what this system does to people who come forward as leaders or to revolutionary/democratic movements around the world : it either imprisons them or murders them.[ Malcolm X, Dr MLK, Jr, Fred Hampton, crushing revolutionary and and propping up fascist regimes like in Chile, Argentina, the Gaza genocide, etc]
So, I think that it shows a lot of chutzpah for him to do an article trashing Avakian and the RevComs and then expect to waltz in like it’s nothing, to interview him.
Not only have you not read the article in question, but it’s pretty clear you haven’t read much of anything on the subject at hand. You’re wrong on the facts about the OL morphing into the RCP, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you read anything by Avakian? At all?
I have. A lot. A lot of Lenin, a lot of Marx (first two volumes of "Capital" among others; didn't make it through volume 3 and have never attempted "The Theory of Surplus Value"), some Stalin, a lot of Mao, a lot of Frantz Fanon, etc., the Beijing Review every week when it would appear at the Marxist-Leninist bookstore/newsstand in Berkeley, where I was in college at the time. I also was in a Marxist-Leninist Mao Tse-Tung Thought study group when I was young and idealistic for over a year (1975-76; I was 20-21; we weren't allowed to use the word "Maoist"; it was considered derogatory or "incorrect" as Mao was still living at the time. There were a lot of other strictures, rivaling those of a fundamentalist religious group, e.g., oral sex was a bourgeois decadent practice, marijuana use was also bourgeois and considered a distraction from making revolution, etc.). I became familiar with the various competing factions, who all hated each other and spent a lot of time writing polemics against one another (you're right; the RCP and October League were rivals; one did not "morph" into the other, though both arose from the far left of the SDS when that organization disintegrated at the end of the 1960s) and the general abhorrence of Trotskyists, along with hating "bourgeois" liberals, democratic socialists, etc., etc. I also took classes in Russian and Soviet history and read a number of eye-opening biographies of Stalin and the early Soviet era, and of Mao and the early Chinese Communist era. I also read a LOT of Orwell, not just his two big novels, but his detailed discussions of the left in England, his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, his discussions of political language and rhetoric, and more. I eventually decided that an overarching philosophy of history that posited a lockstep progression of historical stages (slavocracy to feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communist paradise) was as eschatological and determinist, and as out of line with my own thinking, about the messiness of human history and human nature, as any fundamentalist Christian perspective. I went through a lot political evolution over the past half century and have concluded that I'm more or less a Bernie Sanders-style social democrat or democratic socialist at this point.
I admit I don't know a lot about Bob Avakian and have not read the RS article (paywalls: I'm only willing to pay for a certain number of them). But much of what I've read and heard indicates that Avakian fits, at least in part, the definition of a cult figure. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Like Orwell in the time of the Spanish Civil War and many on the left (and center, or just people who favor pluralist democracy) in Europe in the late 1930s, I believe the threat of totalitarian fascism is real and that there needs to be a broad "popular front" to stop it and bring it down. I know RCP members and committed Marxist Leninists and simply will not engage in argument with them at this point about what should follow the fall of fascism; I'm sure we'd disagree about many things. They don't talk about Avakian, etc., with me, and I don't ask them about it. We agree on many things, including the dire emergency threatening us each day in the streets and all the institutions of America, of the Trumpist fascist agenda and movement, which is still gaining ground. That's enough to put aside differences for now.
Agree on the need for broad unity in the existential struggle to drive out the fascist Trump regime. And certainly not everyone in that movement needs to agree on the need for revolution guided by the new communism. Far from it! But theres no principle at all in dismissal without investigation, which is exactly what you’ve done. “I’m not very familiar with Avakian’s work.” Then, excuse my language, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. “Correct me if I’m wrong.” I’m happy to: You’re dead wrong. Theres no “cult” promoted in Avakian’s work. But you need to not take my word for it and do some fucking work yourself.
John, mack is a great RF ally. Mack I do think you are relying too much on 1970s memories (& not even RU or RCP recollections) for a serious discussion of Avakian and the RCP today. I mean the guy has written like 20 books or more since then and I have no idea if the MLM group you mention had anything to do with Avakian or the RCP (probably not). I think it's a mistake to suggest conflation of the RCP with various Marxist-Leninist groups. I know the Bernie phenomenon from inside (two Iowa Caucuses) and there isn't space here for my criticisms of it, which predate any contact I ever had with Revcoms or reading Avakian. I think it's good to engage Revcoms about after Trump/after fascism. Avakian makes a compelling case, as I think some radicals and even now basic liberals and progressives more broadly do, that we simply can't go back to they were, which got us to a fascist regime atop the most lethal superpower in history. And my own decades of research and reflection tell me Avakian and Revcoms are correct that sweeping fascism into the dustbin of history requires an actual communist-led socialist transformation/revolution. As for "cult," it's irresponsible to use that term in regard to the Revcoms. I'm not sure people know what they are really saying when they charge cult. Let's be "crystal clear" (Nixon) about this: when you call the RCP an Avakian cult you are saying that if Avakian lost his mind and woke up tomorrow and declared himself a right- wing Christian fundamentalist then all the Revcoms would soon announce themselves right wing Christian fundamentalists. Not chance. I mean that's what a cult is---slavish devotion to a Dear Leader no matter what. The cult charge denies that Revcoms happen to think that Avakian's writings and talks align with their understanding of history, society, and what needs to be done -- and for me it is really weird to hear people say otherwise when they generally know nothing or close to nothing about what Avakian thinks and says.
This is like an epitome of anti intellectual ADS, just wild and unhinged dismissal that is a bad excuse for not hitting the books. Marx would not approve and neither would your guy Trotsky. You reject religion and probably don't know or care that big bad
I just read my comment above and could be wrong but don't find it personally insulting or snarky. If it is I apologize. I do think the use of the word cult is insulting to a number of very widely and well read critical thinkers and prolific activists I know. It just doesn't fit them.
I mentioned my support of RF in a post, and the sole response I got was questioning whether I was "recruiting for the RCP." Wow, zero to 60 in .05 seconds. I am not a recruiter, just saying look at RF's message, look what they are trying to accomplish right now: getting rid of Trump, when there is no question that is what our species needs. I asked my accuser, do you think the anti Trump movement in general would be stronger without RF, or the RCP? I got no real response to that, just the bizarre accusation that I would not stop talking about the RCP. (?) Puzzling to say the least. These people are out there, with their buttons ready to be pushed, activating their spring loaded purity tests. What a source of frustration. I am way more to the left than almost all of them, however I am willing to be thoughtfully inclusive of their aims, especially now. Strength in numbers is needed today, and we can defeat Trumpism first, then the holier than thou types can get back to talking about defeating Bob Avakian's imaginary "cult." Why would they even fucking care? It ain't gonna matter that you don't like the RCP, not for a very dark and painfully long period, if you can't support what RF is trying to accomplish now. Negative opinions directed at RF - an urgently valuable group if you ask me - will soon be proven to have been useless if everyone to the left of Stephen Miller is locked up in a Texas megacamp. Come together... right now...
Strong piece on the strategic blindspot plaguing anti-Trump organizing. Your point about speakers avoiding regime removal while crowds privately acknowledge its necessity captures somethign I've noticed at local actions too. The irony is that attacking RF for Avakian connections becomes its own distraction from building the mass movement everyone claims to want. I've watched smaller orgs spend more energy on ideological gatekeeping than actual mobilization. The medical analogies work well here - you dont wait for stage 4 to call something cancer. If Peisner and RS have better strategies for removal they should articulate them rather than just tearing down groups actualy doing the work.
100% agreement. Yeah, if they've actually got something serious for removing this horrific regime, please bring it forth.
For heaven's sake, yes, yes, yes! Paul is right once again.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUZPJq7Ehjl/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
Everybody needs to view this IG from Sunsara Taylor on and against the RS/Peisner hit piece
https://refusefascism.org/category/unity-principles/
The "left" and "Marxist" haters sometimes get to so bad that this happened at one point last year: I went to a Bernie-ish labor-led and progressive event in College Town USA (IC) and politely handed out an excellent RF flyer on the need for the people to drive out the fascist Trump regime before it's too late. This lady with whom I had just had a very nice conversation came up to me looking very concerned and pointed at a local malicious "Trotskyist" (initials CC) standing in the background. He had told her and others that I was a "nefarious Maoist and cult member." I told her I had a great deal of respect for the Chinese Revolution of 1949-1976 and why, assured her that I was not in a cult. I held back from informing her that CC was mentally ill and moved from one split off faction to another every year or so. Knowing nothing about such things, the poor woman just looked confused. The hater CC had done his demented job and the lady returned to hearing about how unions held people out and that maybe we can vote Trump out in three and half years.
Paul Street's passionate and thoughtful article which credits Bob Avakian for his long years of service and excellent radical analysis seems to have triggered flashbacks in some of his older readers. I can relate to that. I remember when I was a mailman in Maywood, Illinois in the seventies, I used to play basketball at a public park that we thought should be renamed for Chairman Fred. Most of the other players were black but sometimes an older white guy named Bob would show up and play an authentic and physical full court game which the black players all seemed to respect. Later in the decade when I moved to California and worked as a mailman in Berkeley I decided to finish college. I remember taking a required English course with a good professor who assigned a book of Rolling Stone magazine articles which he used to trash as examples of bad writing because of their narrow perspective and stupid version of the history of rock and roll as opposed to Ways of Seeing by John Berger. I appreciated it when the local Revcoms staged a demonstration by unfurling an anti-capitalism banner in my Berkeley Economics class which infuriated the liberal professor. No, I do not suffer from Avakian Derangement Syndrome. I like RCP activism, concise radical pamphlets, creative political signs and much more. I detest sneaky anti-communist attacks by the left liberal gatekeepers who serve the controlled inauthentic opposition to US fascism.
My aunt Viona (Ony) Luhtala was a teacher and later principal in the main elementary school in Maywood in the 1950s and 1960s. It's quite possible she taught Fred Hampton as a grade schooler or was the principal of his school. My father or mother told me a story about Ony: she took a busload of students down to Springfield, IL to see the Abe Lincoln historical site(s). The people running the site(s) wouldn't let the Black students in until she threatened to call the Chicago newspapers about their racism. I used to spend a day in her school as a kid in different years in the mid-late 1960s and the change from white to majority Black was quite dramatic and fast.
Great stories! Yeah Avakian is a hoops guy. I used to be addicted to pick up basketball...didn't think anything else mattered for a couple of years.. Rolling Stone has had some nasty history.
Rolling Stone commodifies culture. It will not present analyses of the underlying economic systems providing its sustenance. It’s not like they sat down and a directive was issued. It’s just not what Rolling Stone is about.
Very good acknowledgment of the Culture Industry - almost completely unmentioned by the pundits in comment sections.
I would suggest you add Vijay Pershad to your references. Very helpful analysis especially regarding the difficulty involved in confronting the system not just Trump.
Sure. And just to be clear, the revolutionary communist analysis sees Trump as an expression of the system, deeply and widely understood.
please cite a specific work where VP addresses that if you have time; I'd like to read his reflections on system and the Trump regime.
BTW one of the standard things that is done by old time lefties with ADS (Avakian Derangement Syndrome) is to bring up things from literally half a century ago (!). (Shall I tell you what I was doing in 1975? Stealing and crashing cars while wasted on weed, Schlitz and Jim Beam.) So, for example, one hears from them about ancient lousy Avakian and RCP positions on the Boston school busing program and on homosexuality without hearing that Avakian and the RCP self-critically rejected and reversed their original mistaken positions on those issues. Or that much of the left at the time had F'd positions on those and other things. Now here Peter you aren't even talking about the RCP, you are talking about the October League, which BTW ended up becoming a big enemy of Avakian's over the nature of post-Mao China and other things...stuff you of course don't know about because ADS and RevcomDS frankly mean not doing any remotely serious research prior to statements on Avakian and the RCP. Given the ADS proscription against actually reading Avakian, you are unaware that Avakian has numerous serious criticisms of Mao and that it is at this date pretty absurd to call him a Maoist given big changes in the world since 1976 - changes like most of the world's impoverished population now living in giant sprawling cities (as detailed in Mike Davis's Planet of Slums). ADS means you feel entitled to blurt out "Maoist cultism," as you remember it from 1970-something....in 2026! I'm sorry you had to hear an OL member take a genocidal position on Trotskysists. That position strikes me as quite extreme! :) I was a goofy Trotskyist geek for ten years one summer and still feel a chill at the sectarian groupthink that was expected of me; it was awful. Besides that (and I was a big fan of Leon's history of the Russian Revolution and his writings on German fascism and still think they merit reading) what did it for me with that tendency and its endless split offs was its absurd hostility to actual revolutions and people's movement outside the classic Western proletarian model -- and the related really bad dismissive faux-revolutionary takes on racial and gender oppression. I will add that the Trot World Socialist Web Site has properly understood Trump and Trumpism as fascist pretty much from the start (good for them!) but does so in a very white male way that is very deficient on the central significance of racial oppression/white supremacism and militant patriarchy. I don't blame the SEP's white male leaders' identity. It is rather a theoretical and epistemological problem (Actually that was my impression during Trump45 -- maybe they got better?). Anyway there's more to say but I think the best thing would be to read some of the serious Revcom and Avakian stuff so you can even know what I'm talking about.
Shit, I'm STILL stealing and crashing cars while wasted on weed, Schlitz and Jim Beam!
Just a couple times a year now though.
I often find the common left and liberal response to the mere mention of big bad Bob Avakian to be darkly comedic. I myself have been conditioned by ADS to mention him somewhat sparingly just because of the weird snark- and shit-storm that can ensue from mentioning him and his work. 😂 I've cited and quoted Chomsky millions of time to great approval and in all honesty that's not just cuz of the great critiques he's done of US imperialism; it's also he makes no serious revolutionary challenge to the system and really says very little on what is to be done, foolishly claiming that doing so is reactionary and authoritarian. NC like Sanders and unlike Avakian really missed the boat on Trumpism as fascism, which is related to being reductionist and clueless on dialectical materialism ...but I digress.
It used to be a lot easier to break into cars. If I locked my keys in my Toyota today, I might have to call the.cops to get it opened.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I suspect Peisner tried to use his request to interview Avakian being rebuffed, as another club to attack Avakian and the RevComs with.
It’s as if he has zero historical awareness or care about what this system does to people who come forward as leaders or to revolutionary/democratic movements around the world : it either imprisons them or murders them.[ Malcolm X, Dr MLK, Jr, Fred Hampton, crushing revolutionary and and propping up fascist regimes like in Chile, Argentina, the Gaza genocide, etc]
So, I think that it shows a lot of chutzpah for him to do an article trashing Avakian and the RevComs and then expect to waltz in like it’s nothing, to interview him.
Not only have you not read the article in question, but it’s pretty clear you haven’t read much of anything on the subject at hand. You’re wrong on the facts about the OL morphing into the RCP, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you read anything by Avakian? At all?
I have. A lot. A lot of Lenin, a lot of Marx (first two volumes of "Capital" among others; didn't make it through volume 3 and have never attempted "The Theory of Surplus Value"), some Stalin, a lot of Mao, a lot of Frantz Fanon, etc., the Beijing Review every week when it would appear at the Marxist-Leninist bookstore/newsstand in Berkeley, where I was in college at the time. I also was in a Marxist-Leninist Mao Tse-Tung Thought study group when I was young and idealistic for over a year (1975-76; I was 20-21; we weren't allowed to use the word "Maoist"; it was considered derogatory or "incorrect" as Mao was still living at the time. There were a lot of other strictures, rivaling those of a fundamentalist religious group, e.g., oral sex was a bourgeois decadent practice, marijuana use was also bourgeois and considered a distraction from making revolution, etc.). I became familiar with the various competing factions, who all hated each other and spent a lot of time writing polemics against one another (you're right; the RCP and October League were rivals; one did not "morph" into the other, though both arose from the far left of the SDS when that organization disintegrated at the end of the 1960s) and the general abhorrence of Trotskyists, along with hating "bourgeois" liberals, democratic socialists, etc., etc. I also took classes in Russian and Soviet history and read a number of eye-opening biographies of Stalin and the early Soviet era, and of Mao and the early Chinese Communist era. I also read a LOT of Orwell, not just his two big novels, but his detailed discussions of the left in England, his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, his discussions of political language and rhetoric, and more. I eventually decided that an overarching philosophy of history that posited a lockstep progression of historical stages (slavocracy to feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communist paradise) was as eschatological and determinist, and as out of line with my own thinking, about the messiness of human history and human nature, as any fundamentalist Christian perspective. I went through a lot political evolution over the past half century and have concluded that I'm more or less a Bernie Sanders-style social democrat or democratic socialist at this point.
I admit I don't know a lot about Bob Avakian and have not read the RS article (paywalls: I'm only willing to pay for a certain number of them). But much of what I've read and heard indicates that Avakian fits, at least in part, the definition of a cult figure. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Like Orwell in the time of the Spanish Civil War and many on the left (and center, or just people who favor pluralist democracy) in Europe in the late 1930s, I believe the threat of totalitarian fascism is real and that there needs to be a broad "popular front" to stop it and bring it down. I know RCP members and committed Marxist Leninists and simply will not engage in argument with them at this point about what should follow the fall of fascism; I'm sure we'd disagree about many things. They don't talk about Avakian, etc., with me, and I don't ask them about it. We agree on many things, including the dire emergency threatening us each day in the streets and all the institutions of America, of the Trumpist fascist agenda and movement, which is still gaining ground. That's enough to put aside differences for now.
Agree on the need for broad unity in the existential struggle to drive out the fascist Trump regime. And certainly not everyone in that movement needs to agree on the need for revolution guided by the new communism. Far from it! But theres no principle at all in dismissal without investigation, which is exactly what you’ve done. “I’m not very familiar with Avakian’s work.” Then, excuse my language, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. “Correct me if I’m wrong.” I’m happy to: You’re dead wrong. Theres no “cult” promoted in Avakian’s work. But you need to not take my word for it and do some fucking work yourself.
John, mack is a great RF ally. Mack I do think you are relying too much on 1970s memories (& not even RU or RCP recollections) for a serious discussion of Avakian and the RCP today. I mean the guy has written like 20 books or more since then and I have no idea if the MLM group you mention had anything to do with Avakian or the RCP (probably not). I think it's a mistake to suggest conflation of the RCP with various Marxist-Leninist groups. I know the Bernie phenomenon from inside (two Iowa Caucuses) and there isn't space here for my criticisms of it, which predate any contact I ever had with Revcoms or reading Avakian. I think it's good to engage Revcoms about after Trump/after fascism. Avakian makes a compelling case, as I think some radicals and even now basic liberals and progressives more broadly do, that we simply can't go back to they were, which got us to a fascist regime atop the most lethal superpower in history. And my own decades of research and reflection tell me Avakian and Revcoms are correct that sweeping fascism into the dustbin of history requires an actual communist-led socialist transformation/revolution. As for "cult," it's irresponsible to use that term in regard to the Revcoms. I'm not sure people know what they are really saying when they charge cult. Let's be "crystal clear" (Nixon) about this: when you call the RCP an Avakian cult you are saying that if Avakian lost his mind and woke up tomorrow and declared himself a right- wing Christian fundamentalist then all the Revcoms would soon announce themselves right wing Christian fundamentalists. Not chance. I mean that's what a cult is---slavish devotion to a Dear Leader no matter what. The cult charge denies that Revcoms happen to think that Avakian's writings and talks align with their understanding of history, society, and what needs to be done -- and for me it is really weird to hear people say otherwise when they generally know nothing or close to nothing about what Avakian thinks and says.
This is like an epitome of anti intellectual ADS, just wild and unhinged dismissal that is a bad excuse for not hitting the books. Marx would not approve and neither would your guy Trotsky. You reject religion and probably don't know or care that big bad
Wow. Such a respectful and civil tone in dialogue. I'll be sure and go right out and follow your recommendation.
I just read my comment above and could be wrong but don't find it personally insulting or snarky. If it is I apologize. I do think the use of the word cult is insulting to a number of very widely and well read critical thinkers and prolific activists I know. It just doesn't fit them.
Oh I think you are responding to John above. 😆