Radical Politics 2.0: Refreshingly Non-Dogmatic or Tediously Opportunist?
Signalfire recently explored an issue certain to ruffle some feathers, but is a valuable matter for political minds to consider.
The left — white and non-white — has often made bids to keep its politics relevant to people who may be newly interested in an issue, observe a cultural phenomenon or are involved in mass struggles. Sometimes this can be an interesting thing, but quite often this approach goes horribly wrong.
The Obama campaign of 2008 and the myriad sects lining up in support as well as publicly recognized progressives like Amiri Baraka going on the political offensive against radicals are probably some of the more noteworthy instances of what seem to be political shamelessness. And without linking to it, there are plenty of grouplets on the left seeking to uncritically champion everything from Lady Gaga to masks symbolizing Catholic theocrat Guy Fawkes, made famous in a film.
Is this a good approach? Is reconcieving race, class and revolutionary politics in a postmodern way effective at developing movements? Or is it, as one comrade recently said, a bad attempt [not that there are good ones] at making pop culture into materialist dialectics?
While this piece references Maoism — no shots, sorta — it could easily apply to all sorts of political currents.
There is a clearcut distinction between the creative articulation of Maoism as the summation of the most advanced practical applications of historical and dialectical materialism in the concrete struggles of the masses till now and the liquidation of all the previous experience gained from the movements of the proletariat and the popular masses in the name of “creativity” and “realism”.
New theories capable of serving as a valid guide to action are only produced out of the class struggle, the highest most advanced points of social practice of the masses. In short they are forged in civil war.
Marxism was the intellectual reflection of the class struggle of the proletariat in West Europe in the 19th Century. It found its conformation in the struggles around the International and in the Paris Commune.
Leninism was the intellectual expression of the struggle of the Russian proletariat to seize and hold power. The summation of the first (albeit partially) successful struggle to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. The revolutionary working class worldwide was regrouped under its banner.
Maoism is the synthesis of the experience of protracted revolutionary war and continuation of the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat in China and of the ongoing processes of People’s War worldwide which remain the most advanced extent manifestations of proletarian counter-power.
On every level and despite its own fatal limitations the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution remains the furthest advance in the struggle for communism till the present day. Maoism is no more then the synthesis of this immense experience of the masses as first asserted by the Peruvian Communist Party in the course of carrying out its own tremendous mass movement of armed struggle for power.
For small groups of intellectuals to assert that they have “transcended” MLM-to declare the lessons of the accumulated revolutionary experience of the world proletariat as “obsolete” and to substitute in place of the knowledge gained from real social practice, their own idle, individualist and inconsistent speculations is utter and shameless idealism worthy of the Holy Family.
Revolutionary theory worthy of consideration is the product of successful revolutionary practice and nothing else. Its not a question of restricting oneself to a closed canon; We are happy to pay close attention to the writings of Amilcar Cabral for example, because he won a war.
But as for the intellectual megalomaniacs who think they can overturn the concentrated knowledge gained from the sacrifice and struggle of millions to transform the world over more then a century with a few blog posts or pretentious and incomprehensible contributions to the Verso catalog, we are not offended we are merely amused.
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Though I generally agree with many of the conclusions (i.e., I tend to fall onto the Communist side of things, and within that the MLM side), I found the general methodology and application to be somewhat dismal.
I assume this is a piece in response to people like Avakian, Zizek and other bellicose misleaders attempting to impose themselves and their idea as something new and fundamentally positive, yet the piece seems to fall back into some ways onto dogma and accepting original verdicts at face value.
Here’s where I think a big problem lies:
“New theories capable of serving as a valid guide to action are only produced out of the class struggle, the highest most advanced points of social practice of the masses. In short they are forged in civil war.”
Sure, new theories are forced out of class struggle. This happens all the time. In this manner, my guess is that Iraq Mujahadeen know a fair bit more about conducting guerrilla warfare than 99.9% of First World “Maoists.” Yet, that’s not really what the author is talking about. She’s talking about the really significant demarcations of revolutionary theories, namely Marxism, Leninism and Maoism. This is at least implied when she claims to value the works of Cabral yet does not include him in the ’3 head’ cannon.
The author’s point about such theories being “produced out of the class struggle, the highest most advanced points of social practice of the masses” is one sided and un-dialectical. Specially, it ignores the role of the material and social conditions under which such ideas and theories were formed, and how this necessarily shaped and informed such revolutionary social practice.
Marxism, as much as it was the product of the class struggles of the 19th century, was also the result of capitalism’s full ascendancy in Europe, its constant revolutionizing of the means of production and the invariable alterations to the social fabric both of Europe and the world which was occurring as a result.
Leninism, not only sprang from the establishment of the first large socialist state (which itself is both a lesson from practice and a significant change in material and social conditions under which proletarian struggles operated) also signified the development of monopoly capital and its division of the world into spheres of colonial influence which were occasionally redivided by means of war.
Maoism, not just marking advance in social practice by the proletariat both in terms of national liberation and the cultural revolution, occurred at a time when the US had stepped into the shoes of all previous empires and (according to the rhetoric of the time) was on the verge of defeat globally, and also at a time when there was a sharp split in the (nominally) socialist camp or revisionism or revolution, capitulation or continuing the international struggle against capitalism.
All of this is to say we can’t separate the material and social conditions out of which revolutionary theories were forged when evaluating such theories themselves.
As well, I disagree with this sediment, “Revolutionary theory worthy of consideration is the product of successful revolutionary practice and nothing else.” It begs the question, how is one successful in revolutionary practice? {“By applying revolutionary theory!” is the dogmatist response} Certainly not only learning from past success but also from past failures. In fact, revolutionary theory is usually the intellectual crystallization of a success or forward advancement that comes out of a long period of failure and stagnation or setbacks. The Chinese Communist were massacred in 1927, then later had to traverse the Long March, for example. By such a measure as laid out by the author, we could have considered Chinese Communism a dead letter during those periods.
Moreover and to state once more, revolutionary theory must also be a conscious reflection of the actual material and social circumstance of struggle. As a matter of reason, this is why a sufficient class analysis (i.e. one which takes into account things like the effects of imperialism and national oppression, the development of the First World labor aristocracy detached from the Third World-centered proletariat, etc) is one benchmark of what it actually takes to be a communist.