WHAT IS BOB AVAKIAN’S NEW SYNTHESIS?

Part V: Strategic Implications—Making Revolution

The following is Part 5 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.

This is an incredibly inspiring vision of a different society—a society that the vast majority of people would truly want to live in.

But how do we get to this new society? That leads me to the final part of this presentation, the question of strategy for revolution—particularly in the imperialist countries. Again, I’ll be able to only touch on a few key concepts here, and this will be even more compressed than the earlier part of the presentation.

First off, revolutions are serious. Revolutions in a country like this can only take place when society as a whole is in the grip of a profound crisis, owing fundamentally to the nature and workings of the system itself, and along with that there is the emergence of a revolutionary people, numbering in the millions and millions, conscious of the need for revolutionary change and determined to fight for it. If you’re a vanguard, everything you do has to be about getting to that situation—everything you do has to be measured in relation to that—everything you do has to be about revolution. Anything short of that won’t cut it—and leads to capitulation.

Objective, Subjective...and Hastening While Awaiting

But again—how do you get there? One important concept here is what is scientifically called the “relation between the objective and subjective factor.” The objective factor includes the material conditions of society and their underlying dynamics; the broader political and ideological currents that are swirling in relation to—and in some ways autonomous of—that; the (contradictory) directions in which all these are moving and changing; the moods, sentiments, and ideas of different sections of the people; and so on. And the subjective factor refers to the people who are trying to change all that—often we mean the Party by that, but sometimes you can use that to refer to the broader movement, depending on the context.

Now this is a dialectical relation: the objective and subjective are different, but they interpenetrate and mutually transform each other. The objective factor is like the field on which the Party is playing, and it overall sets the terms and framework. But that framework is not fixed and determined—the field is constantly changing dimensions—and the objective factor can be influenced by the subjective factor. Sometimes the Party itself is a big part of the objective situation—it can be leading a big struggle, or the focus of an attack, or making a big impact with an ideological initiative. People will be talking about it because of that, so you’ve got the subjective factor as part of the objective factor. And at the same time, the objective factor enters into the subjective—the Party is influenced in different ways by the moods and thinking of the masses and the people who come around and work with and join the Party.

But the conventional wisdom in our movement has been to erect a conceptual brick wall between the two and to adopt a passive attitude toward the objective factor—to reduce communist work to taking up initiatives which basically mirror what the masses are already doing, or are ready to do, and then “organize” that. This kind of view doesn’t challenge people ideologically, other than to “take up the struggle” at hand. Bob Avakian has pointed to the “determinist realism” at the root of this—the idea that the parameters of revolutionary work are very narrowly determined and hemmed in by what already exists and the assumption that it will indefinitely continue in the same direction, without radical breaks or sudden changes, without anything impinging on that direction, and without the possibility of new things emerging in unexpected ways out of existing contradictions.

But in actual fact reality teems with contradiction. History, like nature, is full of sudden leaps. Because of that, very bold initiatives undertaken by the subjective factor (so long as they are founded on the real dynamics of material reality) can have a galvanic and electrifying effect; they can be “game-changing,” to use an extremely overworked but still expressive cliche. But the determinist view is not alive to or alert to events that can potentially change the whole equation—depending on what the vanguard does.

Now you can’t just jump off the revolution on the basis of sheer will. That will land you and the masses in a very bad situation. But overwhelmingly, the main trend in imperialist countries has been to give up on revolution in fact if not in word, and to not grasp, or to oppose, the great potential dynamism of the subjective factor, or consciousness.

On the foundation of a correct and deep understanding of this contradiction, Bob Avakian has adapted a concept of Mao’s: hastening the development of the revolution, while awaiting favorable developments in the objective situation—those times in which everything goes up for grabs. But this too is dialectical and not mechanical—you are working on conditions with the expectation and understanding that this becomes part of not just preparing for major changes in the objective situation, but bringing about, and to the greatest extent possible shaping, those changes when they do come. You’re straining against the limits, straining against the framework. And you’re doing it all with an awareness that the sharp contradictions of this system find expression from many different and unexpected directions. To quote again from the recent talk Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity:

[A]lthough changes in what’s objective for us won’t come entirely, or perhaps not even mainly, through our “working on” the objective conditions (in some direct, one-to-one sense), nevertheless our “working on” them can bring about certain changes within a given framework of objective conditions and—in conjunction with and as part of a “mix,” together with many other elements, including other forces acting on the objective situation from their own viewpoints—this can, under certain circumstances, be part of the coming together of factors which does result in a qualitative change. And, again, it is important to emphasize that nobody can know exactly how all that will work out.¹

So whether you take up this line and orientation of “hastening while awaiting” isn’t just a moral question—it has everything to do with whether a revolutionary situation will even emerge, and whether, quite frankly, whether you will even be oriented and able to recognize the potential for one.

In light of that—and in light everything we’ve gone over today—the following (also from Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity, Part 1) is one of the most important passages in the overall body of work of Bob Avakian. Now this uses a lot of scientific terms, many of which I’ve introduced earlier; but in order to get into this we should know that philosophically the term “necessity” refers to the objective reality at any given time—the contradictory directions in which things are moving and developing, and both the constraints on that development and the possible pathways of it—and the term “superstructure” refers to the political institutions, culture, ideas and so on in society, as distinct from the production relations.

So, here’s what Avakian writes:

But fundamentally (and, so to speak, underneath all this) freedom does lie in the recognition and transformation of necessity. The point is that this recognition and the ability to carry out that transformation goes through a lot of different “channels,” and is not tied in a positivist or reductionist or linear way to however the main social contradictions are posing themselves at a given time. If that were the case—or if we approached it that way—we would liquidate the role of art and much of the superstructure in general. Why do we battle in the realm of morals? It is because there is relative initiative and autonomy in the superstructure. And the more correctly that’s given expression, the better it will be, in terms of the kind of society we have at a given time and in terms of our ability to recognize necessity and carry out the struggle to transform necessity.²

Enriched What Is To Be Done-ism

This is central to the very important strategic concept of "Enriched What Is To Be Done-ism." And this concept also goes up against a whole tradition in the communist movement of what is called “economism.” Economism originally meant confining the attention of the workers to battles around wages, working conditions, unions, and so on but has come to encompass any sort of strategy that focuses on mobilizing the masses to fight for “palpable results.” No one ever quite “fesses up” to not wanting to bring communism to the masses—they just say that “now is not the time,” and that “the battle around immediate demands is the best way to get in position to do that...later on.”

Lenin took on that very view 100 years ago in his pathbreaking book What Is To Be Done?. Lenin pointed out that communism is a science that arose outside the proletariat and has to be brought to it from without. He said that communists must be tribunes of the people who can seize on every major event to put before all their communist convictions and he counterposed that to the mentality of trade union secretaries, who lead struggles around the immediate needs of their members. And he said that to do this, and to carry forward the many other tasks involved in a revolution, you need a vanguard party, made up of proletarians and people from other strata who take up the communist outlook and dedicate themselves to the communist cause.

Today, all this remains very contested. And today what’s involved in this struggle is the question of whether the masses are going to be led to be the conscious emancipators of humanity—or, instead, will they be treated as foot soldiers who are fed pablum and essentially ruled over by people who have been trained to deal in the realm of ideas. I spoke to this earlier in reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it finds sharp expression right now.

Look: becoming emancipators of humanity is a gigantic rupture and you don’t do it without leadership. Again: people can not take conscious initiative to change the world if they don’t know how the world works; that takes science; and they have to get that science from people who have had an opportunity to get into it. Without that—without a vanguard that is actually worthy of the name—communist revolution’s never gonna happen. And to feed the masses pablum while you yourself have what one comrade has called your “temple of secret knowledge”—and to do that in the name of “the masses”—would be beneath contempt, if it weren’t so destructive and dangerous and pervasive.

“Enriched” What Is To Be Done-ism is called that because, in addition to rescuing and reviving all the crucial principles developed by Lenin, Avakian has emphasized the importance of enabling the masses to engage with all spheres of society from the angle of knowing and transforming the whole world, as well as the need to “break down” to the extent possible the barriers to that engagement; and, very critically, he’s emphasized the importance of boldly promoting communism itself and of putting before the masses the biggest questions of the revolution—the questions that we’ve been getting into here.

Enriched What Is To Be Done-ism is a whole ensemble, and is not reducible to one single form of activity—and to get a sense of this, I strongly recommend studying part 2 of Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity. In brief, though, while coming from the orientation of hastening while awaiting a revolutionary situation, it encompasses the pivotal role of the revolutionary newspaper; the need to boldly spread communism in everything we do; the importance of promoting the works of Bob Avakian; the need to organize people around the slogan “Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution,” to spread revolution and build resistance to the key ways that the system comes down on the masses; recruiting people into the Party; and undertaking political initiatives around societal “fault lines” that concentrate key social contradictions at any given time—like the struggle to drive out the Bush regime.

Also very important is the strategic orientation of the United Front Under Proletarian Leadership. This is both an orientation and a method—a strategic approach to realigning different class forces in a way that the goal of revolution and the revolutionary communist outlook that we’ve been discussing today are brought to the forefront and established in the leading position. This takes place through a complex process of what we call unity-struggle-unity—that is, forging unity with people of very diverse backgrounds and outlooks around key social questions, both critical “fault lines” of the system and a wider range besides; carrying out struggle within that unity over questions of how to see the world, ideologically and politically; and through that process of serious engagement developing that unity to a higher and more deeply founded level. Through all this, we aim to repolarize the political situation—to overcome divisions and disunity and distrust, and to lead the united front that will be necessary to not only make a revolution but to carry things through all the way to communist society.

In light of all this, I want to call attention to the book Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, that is officially coming out next month but is available at the table, and which very powerfully challenges religion and the ways in which religious beliefs are a fetter on people. Getting this out there very boldly is exactly the kind of thing involved in challenging people to break with mental enslavement and step up to be emancipators of humanity.

“On the Possibility of Revolution”

Finally, it is important here to touch on a very big question: is it possible to win, in a country like this? In regard to this, I want to briefly read from the very important article that appeared in our paper, “On the Possibility of Revolution.” The article states:

In a talk last year, “Bringing Forward Another Way” (which has just been run as a series in Revolution and is posted, in its entirety, online at revcom.us), Bob Avakian calls attention to the fact that there are “‘two things we don't know how to do’—namely, meeting repression and actually winning when the time comes. Now the point of saying these are two things we don't know how to do...is to call attention to the fact that we'd better work on these things—in the appropriate way and not in inappropriate ways.”

He goes on to say, with regard to the question of winning when the time comes:

“We have to take up the question and approach the question of winning in a very serious and not in an infantile way, and not in a way which makes it even easier for this kind of concentrated power of reaction [embodied in the imperialist ruling class] to crush any attempt to bring a new world into being.”

To give further emphasis to this orientation, Avakian then includes in “Bringing Forward Another Way” a statement which was published in Revolution, “Some Crucial Points of Revolutionary Orientation—in Opposition to Infantile Posturing and Distortions of Revolution.” This statement begins:

“Revolution is a very serious matter and must be approached in a serious and scientific way, and not through subjective and individualistic expressions of frustration, posturing and acts which run counter to the development of a mass revolutionary movement which is aimed at—and which must be characterized by means that are fundamentally consistent with and serve to bring into being—a radically different and far better world. Revolution, and in particular communist revolution, is and can only be the act of masses of people, organized and led to carry out increasingly conscious struggle to abolish, and advance humanity beyond, all systems and relations of exploitation and oppression.” (“Some Crucial Points” originally appeared in Revolution issue 55, July 30, 2007, and is reprinted as an appendix to the pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation, page 91.)

In line with this orientation, in “Bringing Forward Another Way,” proceeding on the basis of what is said in “Some Crucial Points,” Avakian calls for study, and wrangling in the realm of theory and conception, in regard to the problem of winning when the time comes. As he puts it:

“Now, in previous talks I've spoken about two tracks in relation to winning, in relation to the seizure of power when there is the emergence of a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary people of millions. In light of what I've just read (which was the whole of ‘Some Crucial Points of Revolutionary Orientation—in Opposition to Infantile Posturing and Distortions of Revolution’), and with that as a template, if you will, or a foundation—and from a strategic, not immediate, standpoint—we should understand the role and the dialectical relation of these two tracks. These are separate tracks, and only with a qualitative change in the situation (as spoken to in what I just read from ‘Some Crucial Points’)...can there be a merging of the two tracks. Until that point, they can only correctly be developed, and have to be developed, separately.

“The first track, which is the main focus and content of things now, is political, ideological, and organizational work, guided by the strategic orientation of united front under the leadership of the proletariat, having in view and politically preparing for the emergence of a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary people on a mass scale. This is what it means to ‘hasten while awaiting’ the development of a revolutionary situation.

“The second track refers to and is in essence developing the theory and strategic orientation to be able to deal with the situation and be able to win when the two tracks can and should be merged—with a qualitative change in the objective political terrain, with the emergence of a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary people (as I have spoken to that here and as is set forth in a concentrated way in “Some Crucial Points”). What is appropriate now in this regard is attention to the realm of theory and strategic thinking and understanding, learning in a deep and all-sided way from experience of different kinds. There is a need to study all these different kinds of experience and for it to be synthesized from a correct strategic perspective—all in order to accumulate knowledge to deepen theoretical understanding and strategic conception.”

And, elaborating on a point made by Mao Tsetung, Avakian has emphasized the fundamental orientation that it is extremely important not to be bound by superstition and convention—and by what has, up to this point, been held to be true—but instead to approach all problems with critical and creative thinking, grounded in scientific principles and methods.”³

So, on that big question, of winning when the time comes, I want to strongly recommend that either people pick up the pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation, which contains that article, or go online to revcom.us, and read that article, which was guided by the method of Bob Avakian.

Conclusion

This then is the outline of the new synthesis—a re-envisioning of revolution and communism, aiming for a radically different society, and ultimately a communist world, without exploitation and without oppressive relations among people. This new synthesis has “ideologized” revolution back onto the scene and objectively represents, as Avakian says, “a source of hope and of daring on a solid scientific foundation."⁴

We here need to seriously take this up, get into it and make it a powerful ideological and political force for transforming the world, while at the same time engaging more fully, in an ongoing way, with the extensive, rich, and continually developing body of work, as well as the method and approach, that is being brought forward by Bob Avakian.

I want to close, then, by reading a passage from the end of Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?, that envisions the communist future we’re fighting for:

It is only possible today to conjecture, and to dream, about what expressions social contradictions will assume in the future communist society and how they will be resolved. How will the problem be approached of combining advanced productive forces, which require a significant degree of centralization, with decentralization and local initiative (whatever “local” means then)? How will the rearing of new generations of people—now carried out in atomized form, and through oppressive relations, in the family—be approached in communist society? How will attention be paid to developing specific areas of knowledge, or to concentrating on particular projects, without making these the “special preserve” of certain people? How will the contradiction be handled of enabling people to acquire all-around skills and knowledge and at the same time meeting the need for some specialization? What about the relation between people’s individual initiatives and personal pursuits on the one hand, and their social responsibilities and contributions on the other? It seems that it will always be the case that, around any particular question, or controversy, there will be a group—and as a general rule a minority at first—that will have a more correct, advanced understanding, but how will this be utilized for the overall benefit while at the same time preventing groups from solidifying into “interest groups”? What will be the relations between different areas and regions—since there will no longer be different countries—and how will the contradictions between what might be called “local communities” and the higher associations, all the way up to the world level, be handled? What will it mean concretely that people are truly citizens of the world, particularly in terms of where they live, work, and so on—will they “rotate” from one area of the world to another? How will the question of linguistic and cultural diversity versus a world union of humanity be handled? And will people then, even with all their understanding of history, really be able to believe that a society such as we are imprisoned in now actually existed—let alone that it was declared to be eternal and the highest pinnacle humanity was capable of reaching? Again, these questions, and many, many more, can only be the object of speculation, and of dreaming, today; but even to pose such questions, and to attempt to visualize how they might be addressed—in a society where class divisions, social antagonism, and political domination no longer exist—is itself tremendously liberating for anyone without a vested interest in the present order.⁵

Is this not a future worth devoting your life to?

Get with the new synthesis! Be part of emancipating humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), p. 40. Available online at revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution2 [back]

2. Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), p. 11. Available online at revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution [back]

3. “On the Possibility of Revolution” in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), pp. 80-81. Available online at revcom.us [back]

4. Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity in the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation (May 1, 2008), p. 37. Available online at revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution [back]

5. Democracy, Can’t We Do Better Than That (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986), p. 266 [back]

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