Talking with a Professor About Mandela, History of Communist Revolution, and Donating to BA Everywhere
December 16, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader—drawn from some experience in taking out BA Everywhere to university professors:
Recently we had the opportunity to discuss the campaign to raise big funds to get BA Everywhere with a professor we have known and worked closely with over a number of years and who reads Revolution regularly. We had sent a letter and materials from the Bob Avakian Institute, along with a CD of Bob Avakian being interviewed by Cornel West.
The professor had read that morning the revcom.us article "On the Death of Nelson Mandela." It wasn't quite fireworks, but the professor was animated and immediately said he'd read that article and that he felt the piece "minimized the courage and heroism of Mandela," and he was provoked by, and disagreed with, how the article painted a completely bad picture of the current situation in South Africa, especially because it completely left out the progress made through elections in South Africa, how much a step forward that was.
He referenced a recent commentary "The Character of Nelson Mandela" by Max Boot, an author and military historian. He said Boot is a conservative, but his article has important points about the progress made by South Africa because of Mandela (Boot's piece says, for example, "But the largest part of the explanation for why South Africa is light years ahead of most African nations—why, for all its struggles with high unemployment, crime, corruption and other woes, it is freer and more prosperous than most of its neighbors—is the character of Nelson Mandela..."—and this contrasts with the Revolution article's picture of today's South Africa, which as the professor put it "emphasizes the negative but not the positive.")
Calmly, we drew from the five points in the Revolution article and answered him. About the need to "confront the reality of the path Mandela charted..." and the situation for the people of South African today as one of the world's most unequal societies in the grip of global capitalism-imperialism, the extreme poverty, the attacks of immigrant workers, the horrific situation for women with the highest rate of rape in the world.
With regard to conservative Max Boot, we said his piece actually underscores the point in the article "and should be a tip off"—that Mandela is being praised not because he fought apartheid, but because he was a conciliator with the apartheid forces and played a role in helping dismantle apartheid in a way that reinforced the oppression of the black and other non-white people of South Africa, and maintained imperialist domination. We made the point you can see fleetingly in the movie The Butler where Ronald Reagan staunchly supported apartheid.
There was some debate we had on the role of elections right here as the professor put this forward as a major advance for the South African people and we walked through what happened there in the wake of the collapse of the social-imperialist Soviet Union, which gave the U.S. more freedom to repackage the forms of oppression in South Africa. We discussed that there will be future articles at revcom.us exploring all this more deeply (and there are articles from that time we encouraged him to explore, such as Raymond Lotta's article in the late 1980s on the political economy of apartheid.
On elections, we brought up the current assault on Black people in the U.S. including the recent evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court—how this is a reassertion of white supremacy, but at the same time—let's right here get into the need for some sophistication on the question of elections and the fact they are a means through which the ruling class demobilizes the masses of people and enforces the continued functioning and rule of capitalism-imperialism.
Anyway, without going on too long here on this opening debate, we took out the new Revolution newspaper on "The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation" and simply said the South African people could have had and rightly deserved this—a real revolution and a new state power that uproots all exploitation and oppression... but ended up with the horrors of today because a revolution did not get made.
We talked about this last point in the article on Mandela about how the demoralization as a result of no fundamental change having taken place in the situation for the masses of black people in South Africa is the worst thing of all, and how all this underscores why we are here today to talk with you. We need a revolution, and nothing less. The professor said he appreciated the sweep with which we came at this and will consider our points, and we moved forward.
He said he read the entire Revolution newspaper on the history and future of communism over Thanksgiving. His copy was all marked up. He laid out some things he had questions about, for example he thought the interview treated the avant-garde movement in the Soviet Union as though it was the only place in the world that was happening, but said that isn't right as it was happening in Germany and some other European countries. What I thought the article was emphasizing was the significance of this cultural experimentation going on with the backing and encouragement of the new state power.
He said he would like to personally thank Raymond Lotta for the interview, which he thought was quite unique, as he said that he'd never read anything that had such "amazing sweep" from the Paris Commune to now. He was impressed. We set up to interview him in more depth later this week about his take on this special issue of the newspaper.
Then he said he'd just gone to a reading that morning featuring a new book by a Chinese scholar. He said it looked well researched, with "oral histories" and "archival evidence" on the Great Leap Forward. And, as he put it: "She just destroyed Mao" and showed how his policies during the Great Leap Forward were responsible for immense suffering and millions of deaths.
So we said the question is what is true. And he said "I agree." And we said, well, no, not so fast: the question is what is actually true... not how many books are written opposing Mao and the revolution in China and communism, or whether the person is Chinese etc.—the question is what is actually true, and what is important is the method that gets you to those truths. Again, he said, "I agree." So we asked, "What did she say about the land reform right after the 1949 revolution, where some 300 million peasants in a mass movement from below led by the communist party expropriated cultivated land from the exploiting classes?" He said she didn't say anything about that.
We asked how could she not talk about this, as it led to the Great Leap Forward? What did she say about what was happening with uprooting women's oppression at that time? What about the devastation after the war of liberation that also was setting the context right in the period leading into the Great Leap Forward? Anyway, we went back and forth, if briefly about this and we didn't talk, at this time, about the Great Leap Forward in detail... We will hear his thoughts on what is in the interview when we get back together next week, but said we want to emphasize what is conventional wisdom is not always true and in this case of the Great Leap Forward is wrong, not true and we all agreed to restudy the interview before we meet so our get together can be as rich as possible.
So, with these themes as introductions we spoke to how a revolution and a new revolutionary state power are possible because of the work of Bob Avakian. We briefly touched on the work BA has done to show that there is no such thing as human nature; that a system lies foundationally as the source of the world's problems; how BA has spent decades scientifically summing up the experiences of socialist societies in the first stage of proletarian revolution, the overwhelming achievements and the shortcomings, and building on this has scientifically brought forward a new model of socialism on its way to communism.
And that Bob Avakian has brought forward a strategy to make revolution to get to that society, and that Bob Avakian's new synthesis needs to be known by, and engaged by, many, many tens of millions of people here and all over the world—and this will make a profound difference as people engage, grapple with and bounce off a deeply radical alternative to the way things are that is viable and possible. We told him that we wanted to discuss with him the importance of supporting the BA Everywhere campaign and also talked about the international significance of the revcom.us website and Revolution newspaper.
He said he appreciated what we were saying, however he feels the RCP and BA "only deals with the misery index and not with the progress index" and that is why he is for "gradualism" and not a revolution. He explained in some areas of the world there is an expanding middle class...
It wasn't that he felt BA or the Party didn't put forward what it is we can build after a revolution (only talking about what needs to be torn down but not built up), but that BA and the Party deemphasized areas of progress short of revolution.
We answered him by challenging the view that the world is flat, a popular conception concentrated in a book Thomas Friedman. We discussed enclave development in the 3rd world, for example India, while the vast hundreds of millions live in squalor. How imperialist capital is accumulated through exploitation of 3rd world countries by imperialist countries.
We then spent some time on BA's work on a new socialist society and asked him to think about the potential of individuals and of society when we could make real leaps in breaking down the division between mental and manual labor—but that that is going to take a revolution.
We asked for $500 to support BAE and the movement for revolution, and expressed what difference it would make. He said he would give $250 in January, and we discussed that being very important and that it would make a difference in this world.
He said yes, and said he is looking into other political formations to look for where he believes the right thing to do is, and put forward there is an economist, Richard Wolff who talks about some socialism and some capitalism. We actually had a laugh, because we took the words "Richard Wolff" out of his mouth.
We said there is a part in the new interview with Ray Lotta on Marx's summation of the Commune in Paris in 1871, and how he summed up from that experience that the revolution can't just lay hold of the ready made state machinery but must smash and dismantle the reactionary organs of state power of the exploiting classes and forge new instruments of revolutionary state power. That is science, we argued. We need a revolution—not workers' control of this or that factory somehow evolving into socialism, which as Marx summed up, isn't possible and won't happen. We need an actual revolution and nothing less. We decided to continue our discussion next week.
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