By the Center for the Study of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
The Partisan is happy to share with our readers this guest article shared by the Center for the Study of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, who tell us they are an association of circles and revolutionaries-in-formation dedicated to the study of Maoism within the national conditions of the United States. We find the article useful and informative, and thus have asked to republish it on The Partisan.
Revolutionaries in our country have time and time again been lead into dead ends, having struggled to lead or generate effective and stable organizations in the mass movement for decades. In particular, the history of this failure has been marked by the lack of permanent and consistent organizations that have a true mass character and are able to effectively combat and resist imperialism. Although this is an organizational problem, fundamentally it has an ideological and political root. Much of this failure is due to the form of modern revisionism common to the US, Avakianism, which pushes to create “intermediate organizations” within the mass movement. While this may sound like an obscure theoretical problem, in actual fact Avakianism’s influence and legacy in the mass movement is something every mass activist in the United States encounters in their work, even if they don’t know it.
Avakianism takes its name from its chief architect, Bob Avakian, leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (RCP-USA), which is one of the largest and only remaining organizations emerging from the New Communist Movement of the 1960s–1970s in the US, and itself has a certain degree of influence among Marxist organizations globally. Avakianism has taken certain wrong practices from the 1960s–1970s student radical movement, and certain wrong practices from the Trotskyist movement, and melded them together, along with their own peculiar version of “Maoism,” to create a new and consequential revisionist trend in the international revolutionary movement, especially here in the United States. As one of the most formally developed and widely influential ideological deviations arising out of the US New Communist Movement, many groups in the mass movement end up applying some of its ideas, traditions, and associated methods even if they are not consciously aware of it. Although Avakianism systematically revises the basic philosophical and political economic contents of Marxism, for the aims of this article we will analyze how it has propagated a dangerous organizational line within the mass movement that isolates aspiring revolutionaries from the masses and their struggles, turning the revolutionary principle of construction on its head.
