Letter from a reader: Discussing “Could We Really Win...Really?”
December 16, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
I wanted to share with your readers some recent experience in discussing BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! Bob Avakian Live at our local Revolution Books. I’m mainly focusing on one discussion of one particular section of the DVD—“Could We Really Win...Really?” This, of course, is an extremely important part of the speech—for unless and until there is a real revolution, then the horrors that are exposed in this film will go on, and the real possibilities for a future in which humanity actually flourishes will not be realized. Such a revolution does critically involve the defeat and dismantling of the oppressive state power of the ruling class, at a point when the conditions for doing that have been brought into being—with those conditions including a deep-going crisis, owing fundamentally to the nature and workings of the system itself, the emergence of a revolutionary people numbering in their millions and millions willing and determined to fight for revolutionary change, and the leadership of a revolutionary communist vanguard. [For more on how to hasten the development of such a situation, which does not currently exist, see the RCP,USA’s “On The Strategy for Revolution.”
But before getting into this discussion, I’m going to give a little background. Going into this discussion, we had been summing up tendencies to be a bit too unfocused in our discussions. Often, we would play whatever part of the film we were going to discuss that night, then the leader of the discussion would make a few points, and then the floor was thrown open. A pattern developed in which one or two or more of the newer people at the session might raise some general questions pertaining to revolution that they had been thinking about going into the session, and then the more experienced people would attempt to answer these. Sometimes these answers “bounced off” the speech, so to speak, with those who were answered drawing on their general knowledge and understanding, often losing sight of the specific points and examples in the film itself. And sometimes the discussions were a bit unfocused and diffuse. Too often people were not really being led to dig into the rich content of the speech.
To be clear, it’s not that you should never have sessions where people come new to REVOLUTION–NOTHING LESS and respond with all the bottled up sentiments, ideas, aspirations and questions that this film can unleash. In fact, we should have such sessions, and more of them. But the point of these sessions scheduled in the bookstore was to actually walk through the rich unfolding of the speech itself, and that was getting lost sight of.
With that in mind, we began to change the way we led these discussions. When we began the discussion of the part of the DVD that focused on hastening while awaiting a revolutionary situation (the last section of disk 2 and the first section of disk 3), the discussion leader made clear that there were certain questions he was prioritizing, and that he wanted people to “get inside of” rather than “bounce off” the speech in their discussion (that is, to really examine the examples being used, the way the arguments were being unfolded and, most of all, the method and approach being employed by BA). While wider-ranging questions from newer people were fine and overall welcome, he would take these “off-line” at the end of the discussion, more informally, so that the focus could be on the actual content of the film. And this was held to, gently but firmly when necessary.
The discussion leader also began taking a more “forward-leaning” approach to the discussion—not only posing some key questions and focuses at the beginning, but returning people to these when things drifted, posing further questions to those who spoke from the floor, etc. After a while, we noticed that the informal discussions after things broke up were sometimes more lively and cut more deeply into how people were really seeing things and what they were experiencing and learning in trying to apply the line; so we began to just have a brief discussion involving “the whole room” at the beginning (sometimes there are several dozen people at these sessions), after the film was shown, to set a framework, and then broke down into smaller groups—and this led to much richer discussions, with many more people involved in the wrangling. At times, we came together at the end to sum up the key points that had emerged.
This strengthened the “solid core” of the process. The discussion leader took more initiative to set terms and guide the discussion, and to keep bringing it back to the actual material in the film, and this actually enriched the “elasticity” of it all—that is, the ways in which many more people were able to dig into this and bring their questions, their experience, and their observations and ideas to bear on things in a way that further illuminated and enriched what they had just seen (and thus to return to the material later on a deeper basis).
The serious discussion of the material on “hastening while awaiting the development of a revolutionary situation” proved necessary to lay a good foundation to really dig into the section on “Could We Really Win... Really?” In this case, because it is so important to be clear on what is—and what is not—being said in this section, we changed the format. First off, we went back and played the section entitled “A Revolutionary Situation...The Role of Youth...& How to Work Today So That There is a Revolutionary Force When That Time Comes” prior to getting into this section on “Could We...”—just so that everyone was clear that we were going to be talking about a situation that is much different than what we face today, one we are striving to bring into being and prepare for (even as much of what would lead to such a situation would happen independently of “our will”). Just to be clear here—and in the discussion we returned to this point repeatedly in getting into the answers on different questions pertaining to “Could We Really Win... Really?”—such a revolutionary situation would be marked by a deep crisis in the ruling class and structures of government, where the very measures they took to get out of that crisis would deepen it... a general feeling among very broad sections of people that the proposals being put forward by reformers were bankrupt and did not measure up... and a revolutionary people involving millions of all strata, but especially the bedrock base for revolution who catch hell every day... and support and at least “friendly neutrality” from large sections of “the middle.” One thing that defines a revolutionary situation is that masses of people, in their millions, would be ready to sacrifice everything to make revolution; were that to be the case, they would need to have an understanding of how to meet and defeat the violent repressive forces of the established order.
It was also important that people understood what we were, and were not, talking about in the largest sense. While this was in fact made clear at the session, it might be good in doing this again to explicitly ground things in BAsics 3:3.
Then, the discussion leader explained that this session would be structured more as a q and a; this was precisely because it was important that things not be posed or discussed in such a way that enemies of the revolution could twist and distort what was being said and discussed, and because people aren’t that versed in this topic, and there was a need to dig into all this with a lot of guidance.
We began the session by reading “Some Crucial Points of Revolutionary Orientation—in Opposition to Infantile Posturing and Distortions of Revolution,” a very important piece to which BA refers in his speech. In fact, copies of this had been given to everyone who came, but we still decided to read it aloud as well and underline some of the points. The discussion leader then pointed out that we had both a legal and moral right to study and discuss such questions that could emerge in a future situation and, more than that, a responsibility to do so. While revolutionary work today must focus on raising political and ideological consciousness of the masses and developing massive political resistance, there is indeed a parallel track on which people should be studying and thinking about the issues and questions that would be posed when and if the situation did take a dramatic turn. The discussion leader returned to points in REVOLUTION–NOTHING LESS on how the fates of hundreds of millions and ultimately billions rested on this, and the need to proceed in a serious manner befitting that responsibility. He talked about how people should—in keeping with what is true—make clear in their questions that we were not talking about today’s situation, and he did so himself in his answers.
Then he said that he would pose the first question, since a lot of people had it and it would be better to just simply pose it and answer it than either have someone do it in a way that might be distorted, or else just not have it come up. Simply put, why is it wrong to just “get it on” right now? And the discussion leader then mainly drew from the speech itself to answer this, while also referring people to pages 86-87 of the pamphlet REVOLUTION AND COMMUNISM: A FOUNDATION AND STRATEGIC ORIENTATION, within the article entitled “On the Possibility of Revolution.”
This got things rolling on what turned out to be a deep and lively session. In the main, people’s questions related to what was in the material in the speech. In the few cases where they didn’t, the leader either found a way to relate it to key points in the speech, or else just said that we would not be getting into that question tonight, as we were going to focus on really digging into the important material in the speech itself.
Some of the questions that came up included:
- what does it mean when it is said that, in a future situation different from today (marked by a the emergence of a revolutionary situation, including a revolutionary people in their millions), a revolutionary force would have to “to defeat the forces of the old order in pieces while also breaking off pieces of those forces, and working to win over politically sections of society that start off on the other side”?
- how would such a revolutionary force—again, speaking of a situation that does not exist today—be able to avoid just being confined in the inner cities, and surrounded, crushed and pulverized?
- what is meant by “utility of force”? Does this mean that they would not be able to attack the revolutionary forces in a situation in which, unlike today, there was an all-out contest for power?
- what is meant by strategic centralization and tactical decentralization?
There were other questions besides, but these were some of the key ones. People would often bring up how they understood it, or where they had points of unclarity or questions. Sometimes, the person leading would find it necessary to rephrase the question so as to make clear that we were, in fact, discussing something that would not be correct to try to do today, but which in a future situation—one in which there were a revolutionary people numbering in the millions and a whole revolutionary situation had emerged—would be necessary in order to meet and defeat the violent repressive forces of the other side. The leader of the discussion was also prepared to say that on some questions he would have to think further and return to the material before answering.
Overwhelmingly, the answers drew from material and concepts that were in this section of the filmed speech. Some of the concepts that would be applicable were such a future situation to develop, included Mao’s concept that “you fight your way, we’ll fight our way,” and what that was based on; the fact that the other side would almost certainly try to bring down very heavy destruction against the revolution and in fact would be forced ultimately to rely on their ability to wreak destruction, but that they themselves also had weaknesses—not the least of which was the way in which their way of fighting could tend to alienate masses, if the revolutionaries were clear in their program and if their way of fighting reflected the principles and values upon which they (the revolutionaries) were based, and thus how those weaknesses could be exploited by a genuine revolutionary force; how the greatest potential strength of the revolutionaries would lie in their ability to draw on the support of the people in many different ways (the point made in the speech drawing on Mao’s analogy to the revolutionaries being “like fish in the sea” of the masses; how strategic centralization and tactical decentralization pointed again to the need for ideological cohesion among the forces of revolution. This latter point also led into the crucial importance of the party, and one based on and wielding the concept of “solid core, with a lot of elasticity.”
In all, we did get quite a bit into this realm of doctrine and principles in its own right. I won’t try to recount all that here, other than to say that there is quite a lot of content packed into this fairly short section of the speech. At the same time, one very important point that kept coming up was how everything we do today has to be done with the possibility of such a future situation emerging in mind. In other words, it would be necessary in such a future situation for revolutionary forces to have support all over, not just in the central cities, precisely in order to avoid getting confined to and pulverized within the cities; but unless political and ideological work is carried out now to reach out to those areas and develop not only political influence but also organized political ties, the forces of revolution would be coming from much further behind than would be desirable and the odds against success would be greatly increased
Getting into all these points gave people a deeper grasp of what was being said in the speech. I think this session enabled them to return to both the speech and to works like “On the Possibility…” and “Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon” so that they would be able to “mine more” from these works, as they pertain to this arena. This sesssion also drove home in a deeper way the importance of ideology AND, very centrally, the importance of building the Party NOW that is based on that ideology. Indeed, this theme of the importance of building the Party—including carrying forward the Cultural Revolution in our Party, especially around method and approach, as an urgent necessity—kept “unavoidably” coming up.
In sum, this was an important beginning in giving orientation on the importance of getting into these questions and guidance on how to get into them in a way that both maximizes the possibility of avoiding distortion by those who would like nothing better than a pretext with which to repress the movement for revolution and sets a framework for people to pursue further study and reflection in this arena.
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