Thoughts on Reaching for the Heights and Flying Without a Safety Net: Expanding and Transforming the "We"
February 17, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
I was wrangling with the challenge the movement for revolution faces today of accumulating forces for revolution and in particular the form of forging cores of people to take responsibility in different ways around various political initiatives we lead, and things like Revolution Books and different specific events like forums or even New Year's Eve parties. I remembered that there was something about this process in a talk Bob Avakian gave several years ago called "Reaching for the Heights and Flying Without a Safety Net," so I went back to take a look at that talk. But when I went back to Reaching/Flying, what BA says is somewhat different than the shorthand which I have been using ("forging and re-forging the core")—he is pointing to a more strategic and more sweeping contradiction.
The title of the section in the talk is "Expanding and Transforming the 'We' Who Holds State Power," so he is talking about the "we" who holds state power, but the section is very applicable NOW to the whole process of "how thousands can be brought forward and oriented, organized and trained in a revolutionary way, while beginning to reach and influence millions more, even before there is a revolutionary situation" (from "On the Strategy for Revolution" in BAsics). He doesn't just pose it as forging or even re-forging the "we," but expanding and transforming the "we." Perhaps this process is implicit in the forging and re-forging formulation, but I found both elements of expanding, and especially the transforming, to be challenging and somewhat different from how I had been thinking. There had been a tendency in my thinking to narrow down this process to be "getting people to take this (whatever the particular project is) up as their own," "taking responsibility for this effort," "being part of the core"—which all too often translates into what people are going to do to make whatever particular thing a success, which does need to happen, but BA puts the process in a much more strategic context. This paragraph from that section of Reaching/Flying is worth measuring our thinking, and practice, against:
We have to be expanding the "we" even before state power is won—and, again, in a more magnified and concentrated way, after revolutionary state power is established and consolidated.
We have to do this until there is no more state power, until there is no more need for a vanguard, until there is no division between leadership and led and the potential no longer exists for that to be transformed into an antagonistic, oppressive relationship. And this has to be accomplished on a world scale. Nothing less than that is the magnitude of the task that we're undertaking. After all, as important as the seizure of power truly is, it is not an end in itself and is not the final aim—the final aim is the establishment of communism, with the abolition of class antagonisms and class distinctions altogether, the end of all oppressive social relations and divisions, not just in this or that country but throughout the world, and the establishment of a world community of freely associating human beings who are, as Mao put it, consciously and voluntarily transforming themselves as well as the objective world. (Emphasis added)
He is measuring what we will be doing after seizing state power and noting that even this is not the final aim, but communism is and that is what we have to be working on. I think sometimes objectively our practice with aiming to forge these "we's" reflects that we are focused on at the given time as being the end result of the process we are leading, instead of this process of preparing the thousands to lead millions referred to above, as part of the transformation of both the Party and the masses. These efforts we are leading today are extremely important in their own right but not for their own sake.
If when the event/project is over and it is just "on to the next thing" we are doing—and we are not conceiving of it, or building on it in various ways, as part of the process of accumulating forces for revolution—then what are we actually doing? When we do make an advance and unleash a core of people around a project, are we measuring that just against the goal of how "successful," or not, that particular project was? As opposed to that, we need to be measuring what we have accomplished, and identifying difficulties we have been having, against the "On the Strategy for Revolution" statement referred to above. To repeat, it sets an objective of "how thousands can be brought forward and oriented, organized and trained in a revolutionary way, while beginning to reach and influence millions more, even before there is a revolutionary situation," in order to be able to actually lead when a revolutionary situation begins to develop. Flowing from that objective, do we aim to not only unleash people in a particular effort but, in dialectical relationship to that, also build ongoing relationships with them proceeding from our communist understanding, learning from them but also struggling with them to transform their thinking, and with that goal of forging the "thousands"—and the larger goal of which that is part, the emancipation of all humanity—in the forefront of our thinking? We need to be working with these cores in ways so that, as much as possible, they themselves are consciously preparing to be part of those thousands.
There do have to be shorter-term goals. It is really important that BA becomes a household word and that the mass, multi-faceted fundraising campaign, BA Everywhere, really meet its goals to achieve that. Broad political resistance needs to be mounted against the outrages which this system spawns on a horribly regular basis. Events and campaigns around these objectives have to be launched, built broadly and summed up so that further advances can be made—and "expanding and transforming the 'we'" is crucial to achieving those objectives. But sometimes I think the cores we are setting out to forge are too often an extension of more overall thinking of these efforts as separate from the whole process of making revolution, a way of thinking, and practice, which has been characterized as "thing to thing." This way of thinking cuts off building these cores—and ultimately everything else we are doing—from the overall process of expanding and transforming the "we" which eventually will wield state power after state power is seized through revolution, but even beyond that, from the process and goal of humanity "consciously and voluntarily transforming themselves as well as the objective world."
How do the people we are forging these cores with, both those people more central to the core and those we are seeking to bring forward into that core more broadly, see the world and the contradictions both of the particular contradiction we are working with them on to transform, and also the wider world and bigger questions? How are we working to transform their thinking in ways that more correspond to reality? What are their questions individually and what patterns and trends can we discern from knowing that? Then how do we address those questions in the pages of our paper and our website—in order to transform their thinking and the thinking of blocs of people they represent, the sections of people that they come from or which they are the political and literary representatives of? Do we principally focus on how they can play an active role in building the event/campaign, what they will do, and reduce our role as communists to letting them know if they want to get into the bigger questions of revolution and communism, we are open to discussing that with them? Or are we repeatedly, in a living and materialist way, showing how the particular abuses spring from the underlying contradictions of capitalism-imperialism, seizing on the reality that communism springs from every pore of society and showing that it doesn't have to be this way, that there is a very liberating future that is possible. And because of BA and the work he has done, building on the past advances, but summing up the shortcomings and errors and breaking through on some of the knotty problems which up until now had not been addressed and/or solved on how to go forward to seize power and then advance to communism, there is a viable vision and strategy, and a leadership to achieve that. And conceiving of what we are doing as leading them. And making all of this scientific understanding, while not being the basis of unity of a particular effort, something which will be compelling and challenging for them to engage and struggle around, even while we are working together with them on a project with its own discreteness and particularity. And doing all of this because we, ourselves, are taking up the strategic objectives of making revolution "not merely as far-off and essentially abstract goals (or ideals) but as things to be actively striven for and built toward." (BAsics 3:30) And are bringing forward people, in waves, to do so as well.
Earlier in the talk quoted above (Reaching/Flying), BA poses the question,"What are we preparing ourselves and the masses for? That's another way to put it. And how are we going about that?" And then a bit later in this section he says, "Even now, there is the decisive question of bringing forward the masses and not only leading them in resisting their oppression today but preparing them for the future, preparing them to rule and revolutionize society."Are we actually proceeding from that when we think about forging these cores, expanding and transforming the "we" at every point? If we aren't aiming for that, then ultimately what are we doing but fighting for reforms absent any actual concrete building of a movement for revolution, which is objectively being a knife in the back of the masses instead of being the vanguard party which the masses so desperately need to lead them to make revolution when the conditions are right? And when we are doing that, then we are part of making great advances in the transformation of the people in preparation for making revolution when those conditions do come into being.
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