[Peace-discuss] 'Refuse Fascism' & Bob Avakian's RCP

[C G Estabrook]

[1] 'Refuse Fascism’: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refuse_Fascism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refuse_Fascism>>

[2] Gary Leupp discussed Avakian’s ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ two years ago, in the context of a consideration of  Sanders’ campaign:
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Counterpunch | February 5, 2016

"Is a ‘Socialist' Really Unelectable? The Potential Significance of the Sanders Campaign” 

...The Revolutionary Communist Party contends: “The Bernie Sanders campaign—like those of every candidate who the ruling class allows to be taken seriously—essentially takes as its starting point stabilizing, strengthening, and ultimately enforcing the whole structure of a world dominated, exploited, and oppressed by the U.S. empire. And telling people that those interests are their interests.”

And: “Throw off your blinders and get into BA [RCP chair Bob Avakian]!  A whole better world really is possible and you need to be part of the solution and not—like Bernie Sanders—part of the problem.”

What is more important now: sectarian sniping or popularizing an ideal?

Reading these ringing declarations by left sects, I think to myself: What is more important? To broadcast to people what they already know—that Sanders’ conception of “socialism” is really Scandinavian-style capitalism (capitalism with a “human face”) and not socialism in the Marxian sense, which results from the overthrow of the capitalist class?

Or: to note and appreciate the historical significance of Sanders’ campaign in returning the very term “socialism” to public discourse and emboldening people to openly identify with a concept anathema to Wall Street, the 1%, and the entire (widely hated) political establishment?

Cornel West appears to choose the latter option. This is all the more interesting in that he has been friendly for years with the RCP that’s trashing Bernie while West stumps for him. The irony is that the above-mentioned Avakian owes West big time.

Chairman Bob left the U.S. in 1980 for Paris and was not seen again in public until, with great fanfare, his party announced in 2003 that he had given talks on the East and West Coast and that these were available for purchase on DVD. It was not clear then or now that Avakian had permanently returned to the U.S. from Paris; the RCP refuses to comment on his whereabouts. But since few had seen him for twenty-three years, his sudden reappearance if only on video was a cause of jubilation among his followers.

Cornel West wrote words of praise for Avakian (as a “long-distance runner in the freedom struggle against imperialism, racism and capitalism”) that appeared as a blurb on the cover of his autobiography published in 2005. (Notice the similarity to his recent description of Sanders.)

He signed a statement in 2007 that appeared in the New York Review of Books—“Dangerous times demand courageous voices. Bob Avakian is such a voice.” The expensive ad was essentially designed to show anyone interested that Avakian had lots of well-known friends and that if the state went after him, they would have his back.  Many intellectuals asked to sign, including Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky (not to mention myself), politely declined, noting that Avakian was under no specific legal threat and that the ad seemed designed to imply that he was in order to get signers to publicly aver that they “have come away from encounters with Avakian provoked and enriched in our own thinking,” declare that his “ability…to freely function” was “a concern,” urged that people “engage with the thoughts of Bob Avakian and bring them into what needs to be a rich and diverse dialogue,” and “[serve] notice to this government  that we intend to defend” Avakian’s rights “to freely advocate and organize for his views.”

West was one of the signatories. West also urged support for RCP bus tour in 2012 designed to promote Avakian and interviewed him for a PRI radio program in 2013.

But the slowly resurfacing Avakian hadn’t given a public talk since 1980. As I understand it, the plan was for a dramatic Second Coming at a prestigious venue in the company of well-known public intellectual. Thus in November 2014 West joined Avakian for a “dialogue on revolution and religion” at the historic Riverside Church in Harlem. An overflow crowd heard the long-winded Avakian preach for two hours, interrupted increasingly by calls from the crowd for him to wrap up and let West take the podium. West spoke about half an hour, and then there were questions from the audience.

It wasn’t really a dialogue, and had little analytical content, but that was probably not the point. “BA”—as he’s affectionately called by adherents of his cult (officially, the “culture of appreciation, promotion and popularization” of a man the RCP officially describes as “a rare and precious leader” who as “as simple fact” is the only person who could have developed Marxism such that “today being a communist means following Bob Avakian and the new path that he has forged”) had shown that he was real and ready for prime time.

In sum: West has helped midwife the public rebirth of BA, who thinks Sanders is in the enemy camp. But West is a far firmer ally of Sanders than he is of “the rare and precious leader.”

Who’s got blinders on?

What does it tell us that even the public intellectual closest to the RCP—someone who longs for a revolutionary uprising as much as Avakian—is implicitly denounced by the RCP as “part of the problem” by supporting Sanders? It shows that the party is totally out of touch with reality. All it can do is say “drop your blinders and get into BA!”

And the other radical left sects tend to similarly dismiss or attack the Sanders campaign as being short of really revolutionary, really socialist. As though there’s any party out there really rooted in the masses, able to develop what Mao called the “mass line”—any party whose burning potential is being stymied by Bernie’s sudden popularity!

West’s endorsement of “Brother Bernie” is in his words “not an affirmation of the neo-liberal Democratic Party or a downplaying of the ugly Israeli occupation of the Palestinians” (which Sanders has not significantly opposed). Of course not. It’s a gamble that Sanders’ ongoing attack on Wall Street and open acknowledgement of a “democratic socialist” identity will lead to an electoral victory that will curb the power of the top stratum of capitalist parasites and diminish the prospects for more imperialist war.

Such a result would not (of course) constitute socialism. It would not mean a real “revolution” in the Leninist sense. It might be a replay of Roosevelt and the New Deal (a series of measures largely designed to prevent a revolution in this country in the 1930s). But should we prefer to that outcome a victory of a Clinton or Cruz—-on the premise that such a presidency would exacerbate social contradictions to the point where the people (under the leadership of rare and precious leaders leading tiny sects whose rank-and-file members spout rhetoric they themselves hardly understand) will rise up in a repeat of the Bolshevik Revolution?

In 1980 at age 24, already filled with contempt at the whole U.S. electoral process and viscerally opposed to any participation in it, I compared Carter and Reagan and hoped Reagan would win. Because I thought Reagan would so provoke the masses by his vicious cuts in social spending and his crazed Cold War mentality that his election would hasten the day of the needed revolution. I was overly optimistic and badly mistaken.

These days I think that the election of a Cruz or Rubio—idiots who could easily trigger more war in the Middle East, North Africa or Ukraine, while abetting the further concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, immiserating more millions—could possibly produce a revolutionary situation, where (to paraphrase Lenin) the old system can’t continue in the old way, the masses can’t live in the old way, and there is revolutionary leadership. But I don’t hope for the election of either; the prospect indeed fills me with dread.

Because I see no genuinely revolutionary party on the horizon remotely capable of effectively communicating with, much less leading the masses. I only see left sects trailing after each new mass movement, like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, striving to lead, recruiting a few new followers here and there, but more often than not alienating those they seek to influence by their wooden dogmatism, antiquated rhetoric, personality cults, lack of strategy and (often) the haggard zombie-like affect of their members trying to recruit.

On the other hand there is Sanders, a European-style social democrat calling for a “political revolution” and energizing the young generation to support him. In U.S. political history, this is not insignificant. Nor is it principally a bad thing. The Sanders campaign, whatever else it is, is a sign that young people are becoming okay with (some concept of) socialism. That can only be good for those seeing themselves as advocates of “real” socialism.

<https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/05/is-a-socialist-really-unelectable-the-potential-significance-of-the-sanders-campaign <https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/05/is-a-socialist-really-unelectable-the-potential-significance-of-the-sanders-campaign>>
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp at tufts.edu 

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