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From Ike to Mao and beyond: My journey from mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist
Review of "From Ike to Mao and beyond" on San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com
Berkeley: Memoir follows author's road to communism
- Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 29, 2005
Bob Avakian has devoted his life to the one ideology that he believes holds the promise of massively releasing human freedom and dignity. The ideology is communism.
Berkeley-bred Avakian's new memoir, "From Ike to Mao and Beyond," leaves a breathtaking impression. Having deepened and purified his convictions over 40 years of personal and political struggle, Avakian sounds a high, sustained cry for complete social transformation almost as if he were the trumpet of Lenin himself.
It's as if democratic capitalism's triumph in the 20th century was history's biggest mistake, a tragic wrong turn from the revolutionary road marked out by Lenin in the Russia of 1917 after the writings of Marx and by Mao in the China of the 1950s and 60s. Unswervingly, Avakian holds that road and is esteemed by fellow revolutionaries as the marathon man of the international anti-imperialist struggle.
Avakian, 62, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and other upheavals of the Bay Area in the 1960s, makes an unqualified case for Marxism-Leninism as a fertile thought system that's as alive now as it was when the two revolutionary masterminds created it to answer what they saw as capitalism's fundamental inhumanity.
But although Avakian is a devotee of Marx and Lenin, he's also respected in revolutionary circles for his ground-breaking criticism of communist methods. More evolutionary than revolutionary, his nondogmatic communism tolerates contradiction, welcomes dissent and demands the participation of artists and intellectuals in creating a classless society.
"Marxism is not a scripture, it's not a religious dogma," Avakian writes. "It's a scientific approach to reality."
New York's Insight Press is debuting Avakian's paperback in Berkeley on May 6. A diverse host committee made up of people who welcome Avakian as an alternative voice will present the work. Although the author has elected not to appear, give press interviews or even disclose where he lives, his representatives say he wants the book to contribute to a renewed dialogue about Marxism and political theory in general.
"I think that Bob Avakian has taken the whole idea and conception of communism to another level -- he's revived the communist project, if you will, going beyond Marx, Lenin and Mao in some really important ways," said Lenny Wolff, who wrote the memoir's introduction.
"At the same time, there's a lot of other folks who are not communist but who are also trying to help him get heard because, from their own varied viewpoints, they think this is someone whose story and ideas and critical stance are extremely timely," he said.
Avakian's representatives said the author is eager to have his views more widely discussed but wants to stay out of sight because he fears government harassment. He fled America in 1981 amid what he describes in the book as a suffocating climate of intolerance.
"Events like this Berkeley program are one important means to get the news of this memoir out there and in that way introduce him, so to speak, to people," Wolff said. "However, we are also acutely aware of what this government does to revolutionary leaders once they begin to win a hearing."
The first half of the book traces Avakian's four-square upbringing and swift political development from pre-adolescence. The second half shows him reclaiming Leninism as he turns aside the conservatism of the old-line Communist Party, the pragmatism of trade unionism, the revolutionary exhaustion of the Black Panthers after their prime and the anti-leadership tendencies of the New Left.
Following what he is convinced is the correct line, he joins with two fellow Bay Area radicals to form the Revolutionary Union in the late 60s. He expands the organization nationally in 1970 in a bid to create a vanguard for a renewed communist movement.
But America in the '70s goes right instead of left. Ronald Reagan is elected president. Under surveillance for his political activities and grieving a fellow revolutionary's murder in Chicago, Avakian goes into exile in France and assumes the chairmanship of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a Maoist group intent on radical social transformation in "the colossus of late imperial America."
Today, Avakian remains party chairman and is perhaps best known as a prolific, uncompromising contributor to The Revolutionary Worker newspaper. In one his latest articles, he says the polarized conditions in America today are similar to those in the 1840s and 1850s, and he predicts a new civil war.
"I have a very profound hatred, and I don't hesitate to say it, for this system," Avakian says on a CD that his publisher has distributed with the book.
The grandchild of Armenian immigrants who settled in Fresno to farm, Avakian enjoyed a warm and familial childhood. His mother taught him compassion and sacrifice. The late Alameda County Superior Court judge Spurgeon Avakian, who was changed by his experiences of discrimination as a person of Armenian descent, showed his son about fighting injustice.
Fresno at the time was split by a freeway, with blacks, Latinos and Asians segregated on one side. When the family moved to Berkeley, Avakian learned more about discrimination from African American friends.
Young Avakian's religious beliefs and patriotism were deeply felt. He tells of saying the Pledge of Allegiance as a 9- or 10-year-old and wanting to fall to his knees in gratitude for "not living in one of those awful countries that so many people seem to have had the misfortune of being born in." Sticking with Eisenhower even though his parents went over to Adlai Stevenson, he was absorbed in TV coverage of the 1952 Republican presidential convention.
In short, young Avakian was very much a child of what he calls the naively optimistic America of the '50s. His mainstream roots went deep, which is one of the critical ideas in a memoir that features a cover photo of the teen-aged Avakian in a Wally Cleaver moment as he spins a 45 on the hi-fi. Avakian loved the harmonies of doo-wop and sang with black friends in his own vocal group.
But devotion to mainstream values gave way to skepticism. A milestone on the way to Avakian's transformation to radicalism was discovering that President Kennedy lied when he used the U.N. Charter to justify a naval blockade in response to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. Classmates at UC Berkeley wondered why he was so aloof the day the president was shot.
Other kids listened to The Beatles and Dylan. Avakian listened to the speeches of Malcolm X. When the sports-loving, doo-wop-singing kid started making Malcolm-esque pronouncements spiced with Richard Pryor-type humor, he had begun his life's quest.
"I always thought that if I hadn't ended up being a communist," Avakian writes, "I would have been a high school basketball coach -- but I was feeling that my life should be about something more than sports."
At first drawn to the Panthers and other radical groups at the time, Avakian turned to communism under the tutelage of a disaffected old-line Communist Party member. He took the revolution to Richmond, organizing workers and poor people -- the proletariat -- against the bourgeoisie. He read to them from a popular book about village life in China before Mao's revolution.
Meanwhile, disgusted with sectarianism and dogmatism in the ranks, Avakian pushed his fellow radicals to stop fighting each other, think big and stay the revolutionary course.
He went to China in 1971 and was awed by Mao's Cultural Revolution. "We saw truly wondrous things," he writes. He came home convinced that revolutionary change could take place in American society as a scientific process.
There were setbacks large and small. Avakian recounts an episode where his old radical mate Eldridge Cleaver of the Panthers lit up a joint and said, "Look brother, we've seen all the revolution we're gonna see." In China, Mao died and what replaced his revolution looked to Avakian like capitalism in disguise.
Fighting on after Mao, Avakian and his party rediscovered the writings of Lenin. Especially influential was "What Is To Be Done?'', which argues that class consciousness, not economic need, is at the heart of the worker revolution.
In the book, Avakian is at his most provocative when he assesses Stalin and Mao. He applauds Stalin for leading the first historical experience in building socialism, the Soviet Union, under difficult circumstances. Although he refers to Stalin's mistakes, he makes no mention of the millions who died under the Soviet dictatorship and insists upon a balanced view.
"If the bourgeoisie and its political representatives can uphold people like Madison and Jefferson," he writes, "then the proletariat and its vanguard forces can and should uphold Stalin, in an overall sense and with historical perspective."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book release event
"From Ike to Mao and Beyond," a memoir by Bob Avakian, 7 p.m. May 6, King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. (at Grant), Berkeley. $5-10. (510) 848-1196. The book is available at independent bookstores and through the publisher, Insight Press, at http://www.insight-press.com.
Contact Rick DelVecchio at rdelvecchio [at] sfchronicle.com.
Page F - 5
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/29/EBGBICCPDC1.DTL
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
Berkeley: Memoir follows author's road to communism
- Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 29, 2005
Bob Avakian has devoted his life to the one ideology that he believes holds the promise of massively releasing human freedom and dignity. The ideology is communism.
Berkeley-bred Avakian's new memoir, "From Ike to Mao and Beyond," leaves a breathtaking impression. Having deepened and purified his convictions over 40 years of personal and political struggle, Avakian sounds a high, sustained cry for complete social transformation almost as if he were the trumpet of Lenin himself.
It's as if democratic capitalism's triumph in the 20th century was history's biggest mistake, a tragic wrong turn from the revolutionary road marked out by Lenin in the Russia of 1917 after the writings of Marx and by Mao in the China of the 1950s and 60s. Unswervingly, Avakian holds that road and is esteemed by fellow revolutionaries as the marathon man of the international anti-imperialist struggle.
Avakian, 62, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and other upheavals of the Bay Area in the 1960s, makes an unqualified case for Marxism-Leninism as a fertile thought system that's as alive now as it was when the two revolutionary masterminds created it to answer what they saw as capitalism's fundamental inhumanity.
But although Avakian is a devotee of Marx and Lenin, he's also respected in revolutionary circles for his ground-breaking criticism of communist methods. More evolutionary than revolutionary, his nondogmatic communism tolerates contradiction, welcomes dissent and demands the participation of artists and intellectuals in creating a classless society.
"Marxism is not a scripture, it's not a religious dogma," Avakian writes. "It's a scientific approach to reality."
New York's Insight Press is debuting Avakian's paperback in Berkeley on May 6. A diverse host committee made up of people who welcome Avakian as an alternative voice will present the work. Although the author has elected not to appear, give press interviews or even disclose where he lives, his representatives say he wants the book to contribute to a renewed dialogue about Marxism and political theory in general.
"I think that Bob Avakian has taken the whole idea and conception of communism to another level -- he's revived the communist project, if you will, going beyond Marx, Lenin and Mao in some really important ways," said Lenny Wolff, who wrote the memoir's introduction.
"At the same time, there's a lot of other folks who are not communist but who are also trying to help him get heard because, from their own varied viewpoints, they think this is someone whose story and ideas and critical stance are extremely timely," he said.
Avakian's representatives said the author is eager to have his views more widely discussed but wants to stay out of sight because he fears government harassment. He fled America in 1981 amid what he describes in the book as a suffocating climate of intolerance.
"Events like this Berkeley program are one important means to get the news of this memoir out there and in that way introduce him, so to speak, to people," Wolff said. "However, we are also acutely aware of what this government does to revolutionary leaders once they begin to win a hearing."
The first half of the book traces Avakian's four-square upbringing and swift political development from pre-adolescence. The second half shows him reclaiming Leninism as he turns aside the conservatism of the old-line Communist Party, the pragmatism of trade unionism, the revolutionary exhaustion of the Black Panthers after their prime and the anti-leadership tendencies of the New Left.
Following what he is convinced is the correct line, he joins with two fellow Bay Area radicals to form the Revolutionary Union in the late 60s. He expands the organization nationally in 1970 in a bid to create a vanguard for a renewed communist movement.
But America in the '70s goes right instead of left. Ronald Reagan is elected president. Under surveillance for his political activities and grieving a fellow revolutionary's murder in Chicago, Avakian goes into exile in France and assumes the chairmanship of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a Maoist group intent on radical social transformation in "the colossus of late imperial America."
Today, Avakian remains party chairman and is perhaps best known as a prolific, uncompromising contributor to The Revolutionary Worker newspaper. In one his latest articles, he says the polarized conditions in America today are similar to those in the 1840s and 1850s, and he predicts a new civil war.
"I have a very profound hatred, and I don't hesitate to say it, for this system," Avakian says on a CD that his publisher has distributed with the book.
The grandchild of Armenian immigrants who settled in Fresno to farm, Avakian enjoyed a warm and familial childhood. His mother taught him compassion and sacrifice. The late Alameda County Superior Court judge Spurgeon Avakian, who was changed by his experiences of discrimination as a person of Armenian descent, showed his son about fighting injustice.
Fresno at the time was split by a freeway, with blacks, Latinos and Asians segregated on one side. When the family moved to Berkeley, Avakian learned more about discrimination from African American friends.
Young Avakian's religious beliefs and patriotism were deeply felt. He tells of saying the Pledge of Allegiance as a 9- or 10-year-old and wanting to fall to his knees in gratitude for "not living in one of those awful countries that so many people seem to have had the misfortune of being born in." Sticking with Eisenhower even though his parents went over to Adlai Stevenson, he was absorbed in TV coverage of the 1952 Republican presidential convention.
In short, young Avakian was very much a child of what he calls the naively optimistic America of the '50s. His mainstream roots went deep, which is one of the critical ideas in a memoir that features a cover photo of the teen-aged Avakian in a Wally Cleaver moment as he spins a 45 on the hi-fi. Avakian loved the harmonies of doo-wop and sang with black friends in his own vocal group.
But devotion to mainstream values gave way to skepticism. A milestone on the way to Avakian's transformation to radicalism was discovering that President Kennedy lied when he used the U.N. Charter to justify a naval blockade in response to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. Classmates at UC Berkeley wondered why he was so aloof the day the president was shot.
Other kids listened to The Beatles and Dylan. Avakian listened to the speeches of Malcolm X. When the sports-loving, doo-wop-singing kid started making Malcolm-esque pronouncements spiced with Richard Pryor-type humor, he had begun his life's quest.
"I always thought that if I hadn't ended up being a communist," Avakian writes, "I would have been a high school basketball coach -- but I was feeling that my life should be about something more than sports."
At first drawn to the Panthers and other radical groups at the time, Avakian turned to communism under the tutelage of a disaffected old-line Communist Party member. He took the revolution to Richmond, organizing workers and poor people -- the proletariat -- against the bourgeoisie. He read to them from a popular book about village life in China before Mao's revolution.
Meanwhile, disgusted with sectarianism and dogmatism in the ranks, Avakian pushed his fellow radicals to stop fighting each other, think big and stay the revolutionary course.
He went to China in 1971 and was awed by Mao's Cultural Revolution. "We saw truly wondrous things," he writes. He came home convinced that revolutionary change could take place in American society as a scientific process.
There were setbacks large and small. Avakian recounts an episode where his old radical mate Eldridge Cleaver of the Panthers lit up a joint and said, "Look brother, we've seen all the revolution we're gonna see." In China, Mao died and what replaced his revolution looked to Avakian like capitalism in disguise.
Fighting on after Mao, Avakian and his party rediscovered the writings of Lenin. Especially influential was "What Is To Be Done?'', which argues that class consciousness, not economic need, is at the heart of the worker revolution.
In the book, Avakian is at his most provocative when he assesses Stalin and Mao. He applauds Stalin for leading the first historical experience in building socialism, the Soviet Union, under difficult circumstances. Although he refers to Stalin's mistakes, he makes no mention of the millions who died under the Soviet dictatorship and insists upon a balanced view.
"If the bourgeoisie and its political representatives can uphold people like Madison and Jefferson," he writes, "then the proletariat and its vanguard forces can and should uphold Stalin, in an overall sense and with historical perspective."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book release event
"From Ike to Mao and Beyond," a memoir by Bob Avakian, 7 p.m. May 6, King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. (at Grant), Berkeley. $5-10. (510) 848-1196. The book is available at independent bookstores and through the publisher, Insight Press, at http://www.insight-press.com.
Contact Rick DelVecchio at rdelvecchio [at] sfchronicle.com.
Page F - 5
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/29/EBGBICCPDC1.DTL
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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I only glanced at this book, and have not read it thru, but i (an anarchist) have studied the tribulations of different Leninist sects as sort of a hobby, the way some people enjoy collecting baseball cards, so i know of Mr. Avakian's life history somewhat. His ego, or possibly his followers worship of him, seems immense. From his crazy days of going of Tom Snyder wearing bullets for a belt, thru his self-agrandizing "exile" to France, thru "Revolution in the 80's, Go for it." to today where Mr. Avakian seems to be sound like he's running for office from a hush-hush secret location (one leaflet promotes Bob as the "only alternative to George Bush" [When was the primary held electing B.A. the anti-capitalist candidate?] rather than becoming part of the decentralized movement that most anti-capitalists have become part of in this post-Seattle world), this party's "scientific" predictive ability seems to be on some other planet (to mix a meetaphor).
As i said parenthetically, there are other alternatives, The one that i think is useful, creates space so that everyone can think for themselves, "Become your own leader" so to speak. It allow for experimentation in different places, it allows for a freedom that George Bush and Bob Avaikian can't even come to grips with. "What? People are doing things without OUR leadership, figuring out how to get rid of the system without Our dogma or Our armies, and they're having fun despite OUR puritanism. Never." Maybe they do belong together. On the trashheap of history.
Sortof like Kucinich or Nader during the last election where he skipped the primary... Every radical leader promotes themselves as an alternative to the current system but there is an element of fake runs for presidents thats either just tacky opportunism or in some cases (like in Bob's) a problem of extreme and unrealistic delusions of grandeur that could be linked to a mild form of schizophrenia.
"Become your own leader so to speak. It allow for experimentation in different places, it allows for a freedom that George Bush and Bob Avaikian can't even come to grips with."
While a leader like Avakian might be better than Bush if he came to power the difference in leadership is very different. Bush's policies are what is oppressive but even rabid right-wingers dont quote him and hawk his book like its the gospel. Bush's followers may worship the state blindly but the ideology comes before the person (people promote Bush to promote his agenda). With Bob its a little different since you get the sense that like most abusive cults the person comes before everything. It seems like cult's like this were big in the Bay Area a few years back but are pretty rare these days when it comes to the worship of a living person.
But while we can all have a good chuckle at the crazy RCP, hero worship on the left spreads pretty evenly over the political spectrum from center left Democrats who love Democratic Party leaders (from Clinton and Gore to Jackson) to Green's who were so excited about Nader or Matt to anarchists promoting Chomsky or more radical heros. If you have ever seen the movie "Manufacturing Consent" you can see as type of hero worship that is not that far from the RCP's promotion of Bob (they actually hint that Noam should run for President at the end). I guess a run for President by Noam isnt as unrealistic as one by Bob but the way it was shown in the movie was more one of extreme hero worship linked to a view of Chomsky as somehow more than human. While worhip of a living person can be worse than worship of dead writers from centuries past (since it can lead to abusive acts by cult leaders corrupted by power) it is in one way better. When Anarchists and Communist quote from books written in the late 19th century or the early 20th century and use examples (like the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Civil War) to shape present actions, the soultions often dont resemble the current problem; at least with Chomsky or Bob the current state of things is taken into account and while their ideas are not that great at least they are somewhat shaped by the huge changes that have taken place in politics and social dynamics over the past century.
He's the Lyndon Larouche of the RCP cult!
How can anyone take this guy or the RCP seriously when they have done absolutely nothing of substance? Just what has Mr. Bob ever done besides promote himself?
Has he ever volunteered with Food not Bombs to feed the homeless? [not that they'd want him to]. Has he raised money for political prisoners [other than himself, a prisoner of his own politics]. When was the last time anyone with a brain asked him to be a leader?
The RCP is a semi-cult known to be irrelevant, a magnet for agent provocateurs and uneducated fools, and does a good job of discrediting communism when we truly do need a revolutionary communist/socialist force.
Fuck Mao and Ike!