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DECIPHER THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY PROPAGANDA

by Brian Brasel
05.15.97

I RECENTLY FOUND MYSELF in Revolution Books, an outlet for information / propaganda from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Let me tell you what I saw: two white men in their mid- to late-twenties, each wearing a black t-shirt with Chairman Mao’s face on the front and "It’s Mao or Never" on the back. One of them, who had a ridicously long yet thin goatee, welcomed me to the store and asked what I was looking for.

"Actually, I publish a zine, LiP," I said, "and I was wondering if you might be interested in distributing it here."

He stroked his goatee. "What kind of zine?"

"Political," I said. "A range of progressive politics, anarchist to local electoral reform stuff—quite a bit of carryover from the Nader campaign [‘96], the problem of corporations—and capitalism, neoliberalism—zine reviews, book reviews, music reviews. Lots of different stuff."

"Well," Goatee Man proclaimed, "There are a lot of theoretical problems with anarchism."

"Yeah," piped up the other guy. "You should read what Babavacchian has to say about that."

"Baba-who?"

"Chairman of the USRCP."

"Do you only carry RCP literature?" I asked.

"No," he said, pointing towards the back wall. "We also have a black literature section."

I looked over at the section and saw titles by Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, and books about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Do you carry any zines?"

"We have the Revolutionary Worker," Goatee-Man offered, "and it’s really good."

"That’s put out by the RCP?"

"Yeah. We have lots of information about the RCP," said the other guy. "I mean, let’s face it: it’s the only real threat to the capitalist system."

"The RCP?" I asked, feeling more than a little annoyed with these people but remaining polite. Maybe I didn’t want to distribute LiP through Revolution Books.

"Yeah. There has to be an international proletariat, and international workers’ movement, and that’s what the RCP’s about!"

"Does it involve a vanguard?" I asked. "Because I really think we’ve seen what that leads to."

"You should read some of Babavacchian’s books."

Now I just wanted to leave as quickly as possible, but I was also drawn to the sheer cultish weirdness of the place and wanted to leave with something that might clarify some things for me. So I asked for a good, cheap introduction to Babavacchian and the RCP—which was when I learned that it wasn’t Baba anything, but Bob Avakian, whose picture was the first thing inside of his book. He was very serious looking against a black background with his grim look and corduroy hat.

The following are excerpts from that book, If There is a Revolution, There Must Be a Revolutionary Party, by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and after trying to get through the 74-page thing, I’d like to enlist the help of anyone reading LiP. I can’t figure out what he’s saying, but I’m hoping some of you can:

"Of course, several things strike you there. One is the idealism of these people in the sense that rather than looking at what the contradictions in society are that make a vanguard necessary, it’s sort of treated like a willful thing on Lenin’s part, or even if they give Lenin a certain amount of credit, then he just made a voluntarist error of wanting to try to make revolution by pulling the masses along into it. They do this instead of looking at what are the material conditions in society that make a vanguard necessary: the division of labor in society, the fact that people are not, in their masses and certainly not all at once, going to become politically conscious, revolutionary-minded internationalists and just rise up to make revolution. There are objective contradictions that make a vanguard necessary which itself also becomes a certain way a concentration of those same contradictions, that is, the contradiction between the vanguard and the masses becomes a concentrated expression of the contradictions that make the vanguard necessary in the first place."

Page 2, Section: "Why We Are ‘What Is To Be Done’-ists

"There is a relationship between quantity and quality, not only in terms of building the party but also in terms of the party being able to carry out its overall line (which in one sense can be viewed as a qualitative question, that is, a question of line). There is also a quantitative aspect of that which enters in, which is how many forces the party can directly command under its leadership. Now there is, of course, the related question of the broad forces that rally around the party to one degree or another and carry out its policies in that kind of way, that is, not being part of the party but still sympathetic with it or supporting it and helping to carry out its policies. But still there is a qualitative difference between that and people who carry out the party’s policies as members of the party and as part of its organization and division of labor, and with that degree of consciousness and therefore that degree of commitment. We talked a little earlier about how that is a higher level and how, if it is not, then the party is not really carrying out its role."

Chapter 7, page 53, "More on the Party and the Mass Movements in Relation to the Revolutionary Goal"

And there you go—have at it. I’ve found this book to be very good before going to sleep. I can usually get through about two paragraphs before falling into strange and convoluted dreams entirely devoid of sexual content. We’ll print what we consider the most astute response and reward its author with a a free subscription for 4 issues of LiP. Good luck. [ L i P ]

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