Revolution#132, June 15, 2008
Re-envisioning Revolution and Communism:
WHAT IS BOB AVAKIAN’S NEW SYNTHESIS?
Part IV: The New Synthesis: Political Implications—Dictatorship and Democracy
The following is Part 4 of the text of a speech given in various locations around the country this spring. The text has been slightly edited for publication. Revolution is publishing this speech in five installments. The complete speech is available online at revcom.us.
The new synthesis also has extremely important implications in regard to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx called the necessary transit point to a communist society. In short—how does the socialist state maintain itself as a power in transition to a world communist society without states—and not become an end in itself? How does it continue to advance—and not get turned back to capitalism?
Avakian has spent over 30 years deeply summing up the experience of the socialist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, including the conceptions, assumptions, methods, and approaches of the great leaders who led those revolutions. Here too, I’m mainly going to briefly outline or sketch out some key markers, and point people into the works.
In large part, what was written by Avakian in Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity applies to the whole first stage of the communist movement:
In the history of the communist movement and of socialist society, the basic orientation has been one of dealing with the material reality and the conditions of the masses of people as the priority, as the focus and as the foundation, as opposed to the bourgeois approach of ignoring—or, in fact, reinforcing—the oppressive conditions of the masses of people, the great majority of humanity. And it is very important to grasp firmly that, in the name of the individual and “individual rights,” advocates in one form or another of this bourgeois approach actually uphold the interests of a class—and the dynamics of a system in which that class, the bourgeoisie, rules—where masses of people, literally billions of individuals within the exploited and oppressed classes, are mercilessly ground down and chewed up, and where their individuality and any notion of their individual dignity is counted as nothing.1
The communists of the Soviet Union and China led the masses to use their revolutionary power to do amazing and unprecedented things. The ownership of the means of production was socialized, and channeled to meeting the material requirements of society and the needs of the people. In the space of a few years, women in those countries went from among the most enslaved and suppressed in the world to the most liberated. The people went from being mainly illiterate to almost entirely literate, with education and culture thrown open to those who had been locked out of it before. The Soviet Union in particular carried out tremendous strides toward equality for what had been called the prison-house of oppressed nations and peoples. And health care began to be provided for all, where before the revolution most people had never seen a doctor.
But you can’t just leave it at that. Necessary as it is, it’s not enough to just stand firm and defend—and cherish—those achievements in the face of the endless barrage of slander and distortion. It’s not enough just to go deeply into where those revolutions were starting from, and the relentless and unspeakably vicious forces they were up against.
Upholding Achievements, Listening to Criticisms
One must also listen to and deeply examine the criticisms of that experience—from every quarter—and ask the question: at what cost? The proletarian state must hold on to power in the face of life-and-death resistance from the overthrown exploiters and vicious attack from without; but must that make it necessary to curtail and even chill and repress dissent, and ferment, and a diversity of ideas and approaches—including ideas and approaches oppositional to socialism? The new power faces a world-historic task in bringing the masses into intellectual life and the arts, and in forging a whole new culture, and amazing things were done in that regard in China in particular—but must that entail a restriction on the pursuits and inquiry and experimentation by people who were trained as artists and scientists in the old society, or even in the new? There is for the first time the basis—and a huge need—to approach the question of freedom as a positive and collective undertaking—“how we’re going to transform the world, and serve the people,” not “I want to get mine”; but must that mean that there is no need or little positive role for individuality, and individual space? There is a need to “get things done”—but how does that relate to the proletarian state as a radically different form of state, drawing the masses increasingly into the actual overall direction and direct administration of the state?
You can’t answer those questions for real if you are facile about it. Think for a minute about the Civil War in this country, and the period of Reconstruction, right after the slaves had been freed and were supposed to have been given land and political rights. Now for many years, the story that was told in the schools—and even more so, in the culture, with works like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation—was that Reconstruction was a terrible period in which white people underwent horrible suffering. (By the way, this should actually give you some perspective on the stuff you see on the socialist revolutions almost every week in the book review section of the New York Times.)
What actually happened is that in order to break the power of the southern planters, the northern capitalists at first deprived some of them of political rights for a while and militarily backed up the former slaves in attempting to vote, hold office, and claim land. But as these southern planters were reintegrated into the ruling class on a now subordinate basis, and as other contradictions in other parts of the U.S. began to boil up, the northern capitalists pulled out their troops and allowed their former enemies to organize the Ku Klux Klan, to institute slave-like systems of convict labor and sharecropping, and to deprive the Black masses of any rights at all—and to enforce this both through laws and through lynch mobs. This orgy of vengeance that overturned Reconstruction was officially labeled as “The Redemption.” And history was rewritten by the victors, until a new generation in the 1960s went back and unearthed the real, objective truth of the matter.
To have actually achieved the goals of Reconstruction would have required depriving the former slave-holders of political rights and enforcing that. Quite frankly, it would have been bloody, and some innocent people might have suffered...but it would have been worth it.
To not have almost 5,000 lynchings in the period after the defeat of Reconstruction, and the effects of that on millions of Black people?
Worth it.
To not have had the destruction of the spirit that went with the whole system of segregation?
Worth it.
To stop the institutionalization of things like convict labor, and chain gangs, and terrible schools, and all the other things that dog people today, sometimes in different and sometimes in almost unchanged forms?
Worth it.
Now let’s turn the page to the communist revolution, which is far more thoroughgoing, fundamental and radical than Reconstruction was ever intended to be and that came to power in far more difficult situations. These revolutions faced not only the overthrown exploiters—who, as Lenin once said, retain all their know-how and sense of entitlement and connections from before, and who come at you with ten times the viciousness and trickery once they lose their paradise—but also the militarily much more powerful imperialist powers. The Soviets fought a Civil War from 1918 to 1921 that cost millions of lives and basically destroyed what little industry they had, and they faced in that Civil War interference and invasions from 17 different military powers, including the U.S. And again, there was the Nazi invasion—not even 20 years after they won the Civil War.
However, even fully coming to grips with that, we still have to interrogate what was done, analyze the shortcomings in both practice and theory, and truly prepare ourselves—and the masses—to do better the next time.
More Deeply Breaking With Bourgeois Democracy
As part of doing better—and even in order to answer the question of “at what cost” on the right basis—it’s been necessary to make a more thorough rupture with bourgeois-democratic influences and the whole conception of “classless democracy” within the communist movement. Avakian, in his landmark book, posed the question Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?, and emphatically answered it YES!
Now I want to get into this by quoting two short statements from Avakian that we often run in our newspaper. The first one is:
The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism.
What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.
And then, from a different angle, this:
In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about “democracy”—without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves—is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no “democracy for all”: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.
Let’s talk about the implications of that. To begin with, you cannot use instruments of capitalist dictatorship—the armies, prisons, courts, and bureaucracy which this system has developed and shaped to reinforce and extend exploitation and imperialism—you cannot use those very same things to abolish exploitation, uproot oppression, and defend against imperialists. And you cannot use the tools of bourgeois democracy that have been designed, first, to settle disputes among the exploiters and, second, to atomize, bamboozle, and render passive the masses of people, as a means to mobilize and unleash people to consciously understand and transform the whole world. While it is true, as Lenin put it, that socialism is a million times more democratic for the masses of people, socialism is not and cannot be an extension of bourgeois democracy (which is founded on exploitation) to the exploited. And that lesson is not only scientifically founded, it’s been paid for in blood.
The “4 Alls”
The proletarian dictatorship—and the proletarian system of democracy—has to be different. It has to serve the abolition of antagonistic divisions between people and the relations, institutions, and ideas that grow out of and reinforce those divisions. Now the new power will do a lot toward that end right away—including taking over these socialized means of production and beginning to use them to meet the material needs of the people and to further the world revolution.
But the morning after victory you will have a society in which people have grown up as members of different social classes. Even leaving aside the big capitalists—which you better not, since they’ll still be around, unreconciled to their dispossession—there will still be distinctions among the people: between those who have been trained in things like medicine, administration, and engineering, on the one hand, and those who lack those kinds of training and have had to work in foundries, the hospitals, or the fields, or have not been able to find any work at all, on the other. And there is also the force of habit from centuries in which the only way that people have come together to carry out the production of life’s necessities has been mediated by—or carried out through—relations where one main class exploits another, and where there is a strict division between those who work with their minds and those who work with their bodies.
Moreover, you will have to deal with all the social relations and ideas that have been conditioned and reinforced by those relations of exploitation. The new power will immediately set about destroying the pillars of this system like white supremacy and male supremacy, and instituting real equality. But even after you initiate these transformations, and even after people’s thinking will begin to be liberated in many ways and reflect the new socialist relations, the centuries of exploitation will nevertheless still have a big effect in people’s thinking. It will be like post-traumatic stress syndrome after a rape; this society and all the people in it have been traumatized by hundreds and thousands of years of oppression and the results in people’s thinking—the racism, the sexism, the USA Number One national chauvinism and the nativist hatred of people from other countries, the elitism, even the feelings of inferiority that are drummed into the masses—these will all be struggled against, but they will not just disappear. And those ideas will feed on the still-remaining inequalities and economic relations which contain aspects of capitalist-type relations but which can’t be wiped out overnight—what is called “bourgeois right.” Political ideas and programs that represent those relations will grow in this soil and assert themselves, and provide a basis for new-born capitalist elements to contest for power. And the new power will have to mobilize the masses to identify, understand, and overcome them.
So it’s not so easy as “well, we just change the economic relations, and the rest falls into place”—and to the extent communists have thought or still think like that, it does a lot of damage. Every arena of society will have to be transformed and revolutionized, over a much longer period of time than anticipated by Marx or Lenin. And all of these realms—as Marx scientifically put it, all the class distinctions, all the production relations on which they rest, all the social relations which arise on that basis, and all the ideas that correspond to those relations—or the “4 alls” for short—will have to be abolished in order to get to, and as part of the process of reaching, communism.2
A Different Kind of Dictatorship and Democracy
So you will need dictatorship over the former exploiters and those who aim to restore exploitation; and you will also need democracy among the masses to truly carry through on the needed transformations. But these will have to be dictatorship and democracy of a qualitatively different character than what we have now. Again, you can’t just turn things upside down, with different people wielding the same instruments. There have to be forms through which masses of people are actually coming to life and creating a far different society, and changing themselves in the process, on a scale that frankly can hardly be imagined from within the mental confines of “what is” under this system.
That has to mean mobilizing—and unleashing—people, leading them and learning from them, to overcome the inequalities and the social relations of the old society, all of which undermine the advance toward a new form of society. It means equipping ever broader masses of people with the theoretical tools to critically analyze society and to evaluate whether and how concretely it is moving in the direction of communism, and what needs to be done to go as far as possible in that direction at any given time.
Now this approach goes straight up against the idea that mainly what you have to do under socialism is “deliver the goods”—make sure that people’s living standards are rising, that their lives are more secure, and so on—and leave things in the hands of the people “who know how to do that.” In other words, “feed ’em and lead ’em.” This is what is known as a revisionist approach—keeping the name of communism, but revising the revolutionary heart out of it. And this was the line of the people who finally did seize power in China after Mao died, and overthrew those who had been grouped around Mao, and we’ve now seen where that ultimately leads—a capitalist hell with a socialist label.
So the question is this: Are the masses going to be people who only fight and produce? Or are they going to be emancipators of humanity? Can the masses really face the world as it is, understand it, and transform it?
The answer is, they CAN. But not spontaneously and not without leadership. People cannot take conscious initiative to change the world if they don’t know how it works. That takes science. And because things have been set up in such a way to lock masses out of working with ideas, they need to get that science from people who have had the opportunity to get into it. Again, they need leadership.
And make no mistake about it—everybody is getting led, in this society, in one direction or another. Right now a lot of people who claim they don’t get led are pouring all kinds of effort, resources and hope into this Clinton vs. Obama thing. And once Clinton, Obama, or McCain is in office, whichever one wins will set the terms. They will tell you what to do, and—as they have been telling you—they will do that to serve American domination of the world and the “social order” within America.
So the question is not whether there will be leaders, but what kind of leaders, serving what goals. Bob Avakian put it this way in Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity:
[S]o long as that is true, the essential questions will remain: What is the content and effect of that leadership—where will it lead people, and how? What does it enable people to do, or prevent them from doing? Does it contribute to their capacity to actually comprehend reality, and to act consciously to change it, in accordance with the fundamental interests of humanity—or does it interfere with and undermine that?3
It’s important to think about this in relation to what I explained earlier about the still-remaining advantages and power retained by the overthrown imperialists and their international connections. The proletariat cannot share power with the bourgeoisie, or it will get eaten alive—as I said earlier, this has been dealt with scientifically, in polemical works by Avakian like “Democracy: More Than Ever We Can and Must Do Better Than That” (which appears in the book Phony Communism Is Dead...Long Live Real Communism!) and, yes, these are lessons paid for in blood. On a still deeper level, only the proletariat has an interest as a class in actually abolishing those 4 alls, and the state either has to be an instrument for abolishing those “alls”—or else it will reinforce them.
Because of all that, you will still need an institutionalized leading role for the proletarian party in the socialist state, so long as there are antagonistic classes and the soil out of which class antagonisms can grow. (Once those classes are abolished, there will then no longer be a need for institutionalized leadership, or for a state altogether.)
At the same time, we have to recognize and deal with this as a contradiction—to constantly revolutionize and revitalize the Party so that it continues to provide that kind of leadership and does not turn into new oppressors.
This is no small problem—and it is one Avakian has devoted a great deal of attention to and is a big part of what I’m getting into next: a qualitatively different approach to—and a new synthesis on—the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Solid Core, with a Lot of Elasticity
To be clear: we are talking about changes from and ruptures with much of the approach in the societies that up to now could be said to have been genuinely socialist and genuinely revolutionary but which nonetheless had significant shortcomings. This is not, as someone humorously put it, “run the good plays, don’t run the bad plays”—this is a whole different approach, founded on the breakthroughs in communist world outlook and epistemology that I touched on earlier; a way to correctly answer the question “at what cost” and a way to lead things in a different way, and to a higher level.
Let’s take the question of having an official ideology, which has been a feature of previous socialist societies. Now, as I said, the Party does have to lead in socialist society, and the Party itself has to be unified around communist ideology, which enables it to lead people to correctly understand and transform reality. The Party, however, is a voluntary association. But what happens if everyone in society, in the Party or not, has to profess agreement with this ideology in order to be heard, or even to just get along?
Well, the fact is that most people are not going to really take this up as their outlook in the direct aftermath of revolution, fresh out of capitalist society. Bob Avakian has used the metaphor of a parachute to describe how things become compressed at the time of the revolution, how society splits into two poles—one fairly tightly adhering to the revolutionary camp, and the other defending reaction. But after the revolution that compressed character of the people’s pole opens back out, like a parachute. As Avakian wrote in The Basis, the Goals, and the Methods of the Communist Revolution, after the revolution has come to power:
...all the diversity of political programs, outlooks, inclinations, and so on—which reflect, once again, the actual remaining production and social relations that are characteristic of the old society, as well as what’s newly emerging in the society that has been brought into being as a result of the revolutionary seizure and consolidation of power—all these things assert, or reassert, themselves. And if you go on the assumption that, because people all rallied to you at that particular moment when only your program could break through–if you identify that with the notion that they’re all going to be marching in lockstep with you and in agreement with you at every point all the way to communism– you are going to make very serious errors...4
It’s not the second coming, where everyone gets saved and “sees the light”—thank god! It’s a socialist society. You can lead people to do a lot of new things, a lot of important and emancipatory things, and set off a whole process in which people change society and themselves in a positive direction...but it can’t be done as if everyone has suddenly not only understood, but begun to adhere to and apply the communist method, stand, and viewpoint. And if you try to lead as if that is the case, you (a) are not going to be acting in correspondence to what is true, and (b) are going to, as a result, dam up and distort the whole process through which people come to know the truth and you will give rise to a phony, stifling, or chilled atmosphere.
There has to be a leading ideology—and the difference in socialist society is that we’ll openly express it, rather than mask it the way the capitalists do—but the people who aren’t sure they agree with it should feel free to say so and the people who don’t agree should definitely say so and it should get debated out.
A similar principle has to be applied to politics. On one level, the Party has to take initiative and mobilize people, and unleash them around key objectives. It has to set the terms of debate. And yes, this can be and has to be a lively and inspiring and mind-opening process—and it has been in the past, not only in China but at least for the first decade and a half or so in the Soviet Union.
But what about spontaneity from below? What about things that seem to go off in a whole different direction, or that oppose the main political terms and activity that are being put forward by the Party? What about scenes in the arts that arise on their own, like the coffeehouse scenes of the ’50s and ’60s with the “Beats,” or the hip-hop scene and graffiti crews that arose in the South Bronx 30 years ago, or the spoken word poetry slams of the ’90s—things that would arise from the people, many of which might have an oppositional, or at least “not in control,” character to them? What about political groups that want to debate questions without Party people around, or take actions that go against projects, even important projects, that the Party and the government itself are involved in? What about teachers who want to teach theories and interpretations that don’t coincide with the Party’s understanding?
To be frank, there really hasn’t been much room for this sort of thing in the previous socialist societies. In Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity, Avakian criticized a tendency in both China and, more so, the Soviet Union “toward constriction...of the process of socialist transformation; and, insofar as this tendency exerted itself, it led to some mishandling of the relation between the goal and the process, so that whatever was happening at a given time became, or tended to be identified with, the goal itself—rather than being understood as part of a process toward a larger goal. And, along with this, there was a constriction of the relation between the necessary main direction, in fundamental terms, and what were objectively ‘detours’ or departures from—but were seen and treated as dangerous deviations from—that main direction. This, to a certain degree and sometimes to a considerable degree, led to a stifling of creativity, initiative, individual expression and, yes, individual rights in the overall process, especially when these appeared to conflict—or actually did conflict, in the short run—with the expressed goals of the socialist state and its leading party.”5
On a very basic level, you actually need intellectual ferment to understand the world. Ferment, debate, experimentation—intellectual “air”—gives you a window into all of what’s churning beneath society’s surface at any given time, and the possible roads to resolution and advance opened up by that churn; it helps you see where you may be proceeding wrongly, or one-sidedly. Without this, the dialectic between the Party and the masses—between leaders and led—would tend to be too “one-way”; the critical and creative spirit would grow blunt, on both ends.
For if you try to give people critical tools in a hothouse kind of atmosphere, it just doesn’t “take”—people have to be led but they also have to learn for themselves, and the leadership itself has to be transformed and revolutionized in the course of that. To get that process right requires ferment, contestation, and just out-and-out wildness. There was no small amount of this in the Cultural Revolution—but we’re talking with the new synthesis about something on a far greater scale, with different elements and dynamics to it.
And let’s frankly come to grips with this: after ten years of the Cultural Revolution in China—the best of the previous conception of socialism—most people did not really understand the stakes of that last battle. Well, the different character and greater dimension of ferment in the new synthesis is one big part of the answer to how to do better next time.
“Going to the Brink of Being Drawn and Quartered”
Avakian has made the contrast between the metaphor of casting out a line, as if you’re fly-fishing...and the “solid core with a lot of elasticity,” expressed by this sort of motion. Let’s take an example. You could have a situation where the socialist government had decided to build a dam somewhere to meet some very pressing material needs of the people—and by the way, a revolutionary society here is going to have pressing material requirements and needs because we are not going to be sucking the blood of the people of the planet anymore!—and someone like Arundhati Roy (who is a very prominent and non-communist Indian novelist and progressive activist) might be agitating against it. And with the new synthesis, you wouldn’t just tolerate that—you’d be giving her air time and funding her, even as she might be organizing against you and leading demonstrations and maybe even some kind of massive sit-in. You’d have to get in there and mix it up and debate. If she was right—even in part—then you’d be learning from her. And if she wasn’t right, you’d still have to win people over—not in a debate against a straw man but against a passionate, articulate and convinced advocate of the position.6
And it would NOT be risk-free—because people whose motives are not good would almost certainly operate and maneuver within all that, and attempt to turn it into something that goes over into actual attempts to destroy the socialist state. And let’s not forget that if you give up power, if you let bourgeois forces (old or new) restore capitalism, you’d be committing a great crime against all the people who sacrificed to win that power and, even more so, humanity more generally.
The solid core will set the terms and the framework. But within that, it’s going to unleash and allow the maximum possible elasticity at any given time while still maintaining power—and maintaining it as a power that is going to communism, advancing toward the achievement of the “4 alls,” and together with the whole world struggle. Now there’s going to be constraints on the solid core at any time in doing that, including what kinds of threats you’re facing from imperialism. Sometimes you’ll be able to open up pretty wide, and sometimes you may have to pull in the reins; but strategically, overall, you’re mainly going to be trying to encourage and work with the elasticity, trying to learn from it and trying to figure out how you lead things so that it all becomes a motive force that is actually contributing—even if not so directly or immediately, in the short run—but overall contributing to where you want to go. And it’s going to be challenging and complex and full of risk figuring this out.
That’s why Avakian talks so much about “going to the brink of being drawn and quartered”—and SEEKING to do that! The role of dissent is INTEGRAL to this model of socialism, even as there are ways at any given time that it would radically complicate the whole thing. Again, unless you are ready to go to the brink of being drawn and quartered—and drawn and quartered refers to a torture where they pull your limbs in four different directions!—your solid core will end up very brittle...and the elasticity won’t be very...well, elastic. And just to be very clear: this is a strategic concept which is not the same as—and should not simply be identified with, or reduced to—being pulled in a lot of different directions by a lot of different challenges, or having a lot of different tasks to do. This conception of "going to the brink of being drawn and quartered" is speaking to something much different, something more complex, more profound and strategically important than that.
In addition to dissent of this kind, Avakian has also brought forward for discussion as part of this model the ideas of: contested elections where key issues facing the state are vigorously debated out with real stakes; a constitution (including the constraints that it puts on the Party); an expanded view of individual rights; the existence of civil society, with associations that are independent of the government; and a whole new way of tackling the contradiction between mental and manual labor, including a different view on the role of intellectuals—all of which I can only mention here, but would be eager to go into during the question period.
One last question on this point: who IS the solid core? The solid core is not identical to the Party and it’s not identical to the proletariat, in some kind of monolithic way. At any given time the solid core represents a minority—in the first phases of socialist society, it’s those firmly committed to the whole objective of getting to communism; and then you’ve got various gradations of people, from different classes and strata, grouping themselves in relation to that. The solid core has to have roots in the proletariat, and the leadership has to constantly bring forward and unleash new people from among those who are “on the short end” of the contradictions left over from capitalism—for example, people who were not trained in mental labor in the old society, or women from various strata (as well as men) who want to push forward women’s emancipation.
But the proletariat itself is not a static thing—it contains a lot of diversity and undergoes very dynamic change both from its participation in all spheres of society and from the whole process of living with and transforming—and learning from—the middle strata. You have different classes and you have various levels of commitment to the communist project, and you’re trying to work with that contradiction—but not from the top down. This is about unleashing a process and then getting into the process with the masses.
This is very different from previous conceptions, which rested on a sort of “reified” view of the proletariat—a view which confuses the world-historic role of the proletariat as the class embodying the new relations of production with the individual people who happen to be in that class at any given time. As I touched on earlier in the discussion of “class truth,” this “reification of the proletariat” was reflected in a lot of emphasis on the class origins of people in evaluating their opinions and putting them into positions of leadership or responsibility, and held that if workers and peasants were in such positions, you were somehow guaranteeing against revisionism. This was very pronounced with Stalin, but also found expression with Mao and the Chinese Revolution in different ways.
Once More on the New Synthesis
So we’ve covered a lot in terms of the political implications of the new synthesis, particularly in regards to socialism. But before we move on to strategy, and on the basis of everything I’ve just said, I want people to think about how much—and with how much profound importance—is captured in the following description of the new synthesis from Part 1 of Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity:
This new synthesis involves a recasting and recombining of the positive aspects of the experience so far of the communist movement and of socialist society, while learning from the negative aspects of this experience, in the philosophical and ideological as well as the political dimensions, so as to have a more deeply and firmly rooted scientific orientation, method and approach with regard not only to making revolution and seizing power but then, yes, to meeting the material requirements of society and the needs of the masses of people, in an increasingly expanding way, in socialist society—overcoming the deep scars of the past and continuing the revolutionary transformation of society, while at the same time actively supporting the world revolutionary struggle and acting on the recognition that the world arena and the world struggle are most fundamental and important, in an overall sense—together with opening up qualitatively more space to give expression to the intellectual and cultural needs of the people, broadly understood, and enabling a more diverse and rich process of exploration and experimentation in the realms of science, art and culture, and intellectual life overall, with increasing scope for the contention of different ideas and schools of thought and for individual initiative and creativity and protection of individual rights, including space for individuals to interact in “civil society” independently of the state—all within an overall cooperative and collective framework and at the same time as state power is maintained and further developed as a revolutionary state power serving the interests of the proletarian revolution, in the particular country and worldwide, with this state being the leading and central element in the economy and in the overall direction of society, while the state itself is being continually transformed into something radically different from all previous states, as a crucial part of the advance toward the eventual abolition of the state with the achievement of communism on a world scale.7
Let me put it like this: the first stage of our movement was epochal and heroic—it deserves and demands deeper study and it must be defended and upheld. But the best of that understanding alone would not and will not get humanity to communism. With the new synthesis, that prospect has been re-opened; as one comrade put it to me, it’s like a new branch on the evolutionary bush.
Next: Part V: Strategic Implications—Making Revolution
FOOTNOTE:
1. Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), p. 31. Available online at revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution[back]
2. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-50, in Marx-Engels Selected Works, Volume 1 [back]
3. Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), p. 52. Available online at revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution2 [back]
4. The Basis, The Goals and the Methods of Communist Revolution, available online at revcom.us/avakian/basis-goals-methods [back]
5. Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), p. 35. Available online at revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution [back]
6. Question Three of the Question and Answer session to the 7 Talks (audio), posted Aug 4, 2006 at bobavakian.net [back]
7. Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), p. 35. Available online at revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution [back]
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