The
US elections and
the role
of Avakian
"[...]you say your state is free, whereas in reality, as long as there is private property, your state, even if it is a democratic republic, is nothing but a machine used by the capitalists to suppress the workers, and the freer the state, the more clearly is this expressed. Examples of this are Switzerland in Europe and the United States in America. Nowhere does capital rule so cynically and ruthlessly, and nowhere is it so clearly apparent, as in these countries, although they are democratic republics, no matter how prettily they are painted and notwithstanding all the talk about labour democracy and the equality of all citizens. The fact is that in Switzerland and the United States capital dominates, and every attempt of the workers to achieve the slightest real improvement in their condition is immediately met by civil war. There are fewer soldiers, a smaller standing army, in these countries—Switzerland has a militia and every Swiss has a gun at home, while in America there was no standing army until quite recently and so when there is a strike the bourgeoisie arms, hires soldiery and suppresses the strike; and nowhere is this suppression of the working-class movement accompanied by such ruthless severity as in Switzerland and the U.S.A. , and nowhere does the influence of capital in parliament manifest itself as powerfully as in these countries. The power of capital is everything, the stock exchange is everything, while parliament and elections are marionettes, puppets....[...]"i
In
November, a major event in international class struggle takes place,
the presidential elections in the imperialist United States, the sole
hegemonic superpower. This document is addressed primarily to the
communists and
other revolutionaries over
there. Its
central document, in a negative way, is
the Statement of Bob Avakian from August 2020, in which he calls to
vote for Joe Biden.
Of course, the comrades in the United States know about Avakians deeply black role and the necessity of the boycott, but this does not change the importance and correctness of this document, it deepens what is already clear. First, we should set forth the position of the international proletariat, with its ideology, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, with the universally valid contributions of Chairman Gonzalo, in service of world proletarian revolution, to combat opportunism and revisionism irreconcilably. The following quotation is a successful synthesis of our ideology in relation to the imperialists' electoral circus and should be an answer to the fundamental questions.
Revolutionary violence and parliamentary cretinism comprise an antagonistic contradiction and evidently a fundamental question of Marxism
"Revolutionary violence and parliamentary cretinism comprise an antagonistic contradiction and evidently a fundamental question of Marxism. Marx spoke of violence as the midwife of history and in the Manifesto, along with Engels, he laid out: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!" Similarly, Lenin wrote: "No significant revolution in history has come about without a civil war. No serious Marxist would conceive the transition from capitalism to socialism without civil war." He reiterated the following: "Between capitalism and socialism there will be a long period of 'birth pangs', because violence is always the midwife of the old society," and that the bourgeois state "cannot be substituted by the proletarian state (by the dictatorship of the proletariat) through 'extinction', but only, as a general rule, by way of a violent revolution." Similarly, he insisted on "the necessity of systematically educating the masses in this, precisely because this idea about revolutionary violence is basic to the entire doctrine of Marx and Engels."
In the same vein, Chairman Mao's point of departure that "all Communists must understand this truth that political power grows from the barrel of a gun," establishing that " ... in class societies revolutions and revolutionary war are inevitable. Without them there would be no leaps in social development, and the dominant reactionary classes could not be overthrown nor could the people conquer political power... The central task and superior form of a revolution is the seizure of power through arms, the solution of the problem through war. This Marxist-Leninist principle of revolution has universal validity, both in China as well as in other countries." And "the experience of class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that only through the power of guns can the working class and the working masses overthrow the bourgeoisie and the armed landlords. In this sense, we can say that only through arms can the entire world be transformed." With respect to the parliamentary cretinism condemned by Marx, Lenin was powerfully clear: "the followers of Bernstein accepted and continue to accept Marxism with the exception of its directly revolutionary aspect. They see parliamentary struggle not as one of the methods of struggle that is used particularly in some periods of history, but as the principal and almost exclusive form of struggle, which makes 'violence', the 'seizure of power' and 'dictatorship' unnecessary." And:"only the knaves and fools can believe that the proletariat should first win a majority of votes in elections realized under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, under the yoke of wage slavery, and that only after this should they conquer power. This is the height of silliness or hypocrisy. This substitution of the class struggle and revolution for elections under the old regime, under the old power." And:"This is now the most pure and vile form of opportunism. It is to renounce the act of revolution while revering it in words."
Linked to this contradiction we should keep in mind the position of Marx on elections, as quoted before, about the periodic allowance of the oppressed to elect their oppressors, and principally Chairman Mao's position: "Some say that elections are something very good and very democratic. As far as I am concerned, elections are simply a high- sounding word, and I don't believe there are any genuine elections. The Peking District has elected me to serve as the representative to the National People's Assembly, but how many in Peking really understand me? I perceive that Chou En-lai was named Premier by the Central Committee.""ii
Imperialism, as Lenin rightly pointed out, is 1. monopolistic capitalism; 2. parasitic or rotten capitalism; 3. dying capitalism; the epoch of finance capital and monopolies, which everywhere carry the urge for domination and not for freedom; reaction all along the line, under whatever political system, is the extreme intensification of the contradictions in this field too – this is the result of this tendency. And this is precisely why the masses have nothing more to expect from the elections of the bourgeoisie than more oppression, more suffering and more terror; they are merely an instrument of the oppressors to legitimize their doomed power.
For we are living, as Chairman Mao defined it, in the "epoch of 50 to 100 years" in which imperialism will be swept from the face of the earth once and for all, just as we are in the strategic offensive of world proletarian revolution, which was initiated with the People’s War in Peru, and will bring us many new People’s Wars, initiated by the Communist Parties to be constituted or reconstituted in the respective countries, to culminate finally in the world People’s War. Therefore the masses have nothing to expect from the elections of the bourgeoisie, nothing good comes from them for the proletariat and the people, they are means for replacing the old reactionary representatives by new representatives of the oppressors in government; the present unequal development of the revolutionary situation in the United States determines there the policy, strategy and tactics of the proletariat and its party; this means the communists must lead the proletariat and the masses on the path of the reconstitution of the Communist Party and socialist revolution through People's War. This elections are merely an instrument of the oppressors to lend apparent legitimacy to their power. The proletarians have nothing to lose, and the answer to the bourgeoisie's elections can only be boycott, but boycott of reactionary elections is more than just non-participation in the elections; it is a tactic in the service of the strategy of the international proletariat.
"Active boycott' is [...] agitation, advertising, organization of the revolutionary forces on a larger scale, with doubled energy, under triple pressure. But such work is unthinkable without a clear, precise and direct slogan. This slogan can only be armed insurrection. When some people now say that the elections must be used by us as a stage for agitation and propaganda among the masses, we say to them: "You are right! In the form of election boycott!" This is the only way the communists can utilize the bourgeois elections to serve their goal, the seizure of power by the proletariat. This is not primarily a matter of increasing the number of invalid votes; this cannot be the purpose of the boycott, for this alone is not a break with parliamentary cretinism, any more than it is to vote for or call for any "satire" or "fun" party. The only expression of this is that one disagrees with the "choice" one has, but actually agrees with the bourgeois elections and what they represent. The goal of the proletarian revolutionaries must be to affirm the masses' sense that the bourgeois elections are a farce and to raise their consciousness of this, thereby destroying residual illusions in the bourgeois state and then creating something new through the politicization, mobilization and organization of the masses. Thus, in this aspect, the election boycott unites the two sides of the war-destruction and construction, the latter being the main thing, and educates the masses on the question of revolutionary violence."iii
Regarding the boycott, the Communist Party of Peru has established: "The Communist Party of Peru has only called for a boycott in the last elections to make them more difficult and to prevent them where this is possible, but not to prevent the whole electoral process. As the reaction has said, it has tried to blame the party in order to achieve a false victory, in the absence of real victories; but the main historical tendency is the fusion of the People's War led by the party with the great tide of millions of voters who have not registered, have not voted or have voted in blank; this tide is the one that the party has been structuring as part of the sea of armed masses, which has to sweep away in any case the old order of exploitation and oppression"iv
We see that the comrades in the United States are applying this line and that is good and so this practice will show more and more the correctness of the election boycott, whereby it must never be forgotten that the construction, the raising of the consciousness of the masses, is principal.
Not all violence and reaction is fascism
This
is the position of the international proletariat, but how do the
so-called "revolutionary communists", Avakian and his
followers, see
it?
“The Trump/Pence Regime is a Fascist Regime. Not insult or exaggeration, this is what it is. For the future of humanity and the planet, we, the people, must drive this regime out."v
In the first place, it must be clear that Trump is arch-reactionary and has headed an even more reactionary government than those of his predecessors, but this is in the nature of imperialism and is an expression of the process of the reactionarysation of the bourgeois state, but if Biden forms a new government, it will be likewise more reactionary than the previous one. This is shown by the historical development of the contradiction between revolution and counter-revolution.
Trump
is not a fascist, not everything violent is fascism; while fascism
resorts to open violence, it cannot always be identified with
fascism, since the bourgeois state itself is organized violence. What
Trump has done is to continue what the previous governments of both
parties did, to centralize more power in the president (presidential
absolutism), strengthening the power of the Executive, of the high
bureaucracy of the state and imperialist armed forces to the
detriment of the parliament (crisis of parliamentarism),
reactionarysation of the state corresponding to the general crisis of
imperialism.
This is a question of the reactionarysation of the state in a specific historical-social formation, the United States, which have reached the stage of imperialism and are struggling in a greater decomposition, which as the only hegemonic superpower embarked decades ago on the long process of the collapse of imperialism. This necessarily leads us to have to deal with the issue of the so-called "militias", so publicized in the various media nowadays, for exercising in the most open and brutal way the reactionary violence against the current protests of the masses in the USA, whose real character was already established by Lenin in his famous lecture at the Sverdlov University on the State, auxiliary forces of the army and the police to repress the exploited, let us take the point before continuing.
Militias – auxiliary forces of the army and the police to repress the exploited
The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Due to decision of the Supreme Court (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008) militias are not repealed by the National Guard or State Defence Forces. This is why militias cannot been seen as unlawful or antidemocratic but as a "necessary" constitutional key issue, true to the state, defenders of bourgeois democracy (if they take up arms in the name of law and order), corresponding to the legal system of the USA. It is to be uphold what the CPP has declared in its International Line: "[...]The U.S. has an economy centred on non-state monopoly of property; politically, it develops a bourgeois democracy with a growing restriction of rights. It is a reactionary liberalism[...]"vi That keeps on being the truth. This is particularly important in international context where US militia groups are often equated with Italian Blackshirts or German Sturmabteilung what is profoundly wrong. Among the plenty militia groups (with around 50 to 75,000 members) there are quite a lot of reactionaries, nationalists and racists, but neither is every reactionary, nationalist or racist inevitably a fascist, nor is his organisational form. A famous diehard reactionary and awfully brutal one, the Ku Klux Klan, founded after the Dixie's defeat in the American Civil War, emerged into an antiblack, anticatholic and antijewish organisation in the early 20th century, and today divided in several smaller splinter groups is even by the Anti-Diffamation-League called "white supremacist" (ADL: "Tattered Robes", 2016), not fascist. Only a few militias can be counted as literally fascist. Bourgeois media, revisionists and opportunist only label the majority of the militias as fascist. They are not paramilitary but auxiliary troops for the police, defenders of bourgeois dictatorship against the uprisings of the masses. Trump himself is indifferent regarding the support of this few fascist militias, his ambiguity is an electoral manoeuvre. And even though he is supported by them this doesn't mean he himself is a fascist. It is noteworthy that bourgeois rulers do not dream of fascism but bourgeois democracy, because fascism sharpens contradictions and is less calm. The conditions are poorer with fascism for the ruling class and they will try slaughter revolution anyway, with or without fascism. Fascism is not the only way to wage counter-revolutionary war. Absolute centralisation takes shape in two forms: presidential absolutism and fascism. One of this two can be applied by reaction regarding the concrete social and historical specifics of the country. As Lenin thought: "[...]and nowhere is this suppression of the working-class movement accompanied by such ruthless severity as in Switzerland and the U.S.A. [...]"vii
Trump’s stance and the revisionist Bob Avakian
Let's
go further, Trump neither declares himself an enemy of parliament,
nor of the other institutions of bourgeois democracy like the parties
and the so-called "individual liberties," but rather he
proclaims to defend them, accusing the governors of the Democratic
Party of subjugating them with the measures of "corona-quarantine”.
Trump and the Republican Party do not advocate an organic
restructuring of society (corporatism); Trump is as much a supporter
of the representative system as his rival Biden; according to this
system, representatives are elected by citizens who have different
conflicting interests; This is not the case in the corporatist
organization, where the organs of the state, such as the legislative
chamber, are made up of members who come from the different strata of
the nation or community at whose head is the Fuehrer or Duce, as the
faithful interpreter of the will of the "community of the
people" or of "the nation”; Therefore, its members are
designated according to the system of participation, coming from the
state, the company and the workers (system of corporate
participation) and organized in the fascist party, which can have
different names, next to which many times there are some other
parties but only in name. It seeks to "suppress the class
struggle and the parties", not only the communist party but also
the demo-bourgeois parties.
In
the case of Trump, he presents himself as a defender of the freedom
of the individual and demagogically demands "less state"
which means less taxes for the big monopolists. Being a chauvinist
and using reactionary violence does not make any reactionary a
fascist. All reactionaries, opportunists and revisionists are
chauvinists, striving
to defend their imperialist nation.
In Avakian´s
case, he does not start from the class standpoint of the proletariat,
but from the bourgeois standpoint. Through the elections he wants to
defend the supposedly threatened democracy, bourgeois democracy,
which is nothing more than the current
form of government of the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie. That is why he points to Trump as the main enemy
of the people and not to imperialism and its system of class
dictatorship. For him, as a representative of the opportunist policy
with regard to the elections, it is necessary to choose between "the
greater evil and the lesser evil," that is why he calls for
everyone to unite by voting
against the common enemy by going to the polls. It is the same
reactionary objective of having a future president "legitimized"
by a larger vote. That is the talisman of the vote. Like the king of
France, who was a prince appointed by his peers gathered in an
electoral college through the vote, thus becoming king of France by
divine grace.
The tendency of reactionarysation of the state
Marx already said that the development of the bourgeois system leads to the strengthening of the executive and the armed forces, so the power of parliament is weakened. After the First World War, the crisis of parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy occurred, which will continue throughout the 20th century. Further decomposition of imperialism from the 1980s onwards, imperialism enters its general and final crisis and its sweeping by the world revolution. Greater reactionarysation of the bourgeois state, corresponding to the economic and political relations that are developing through the process of decomposition of imperialism.
History has shown, since the beginning of the offensive of the world proletarian revolution, i.e. since the beginning of the 1980s, that every government is more reactionary than its predecessor, regardless of which party they belong to, whether in the oppressed nations or in the imperialist countries. Imperialism, with each day that passes, is more monopolistic, more parasitic and more moribund; all the contradictions are sharpening; the contradictions between oppressors and oppressed, between exploiters and exploited, are intensifying, which is provoking more and more reaction and terror from the rulers, in defence of their power condemned to death. Greater collusion and inter-reactionary struggle, which is expressed in a profound division of U.S. political life, between the executive and the parliament, which impedes the timely response of the imperialist government to the complicated situations it has to face, which brings the ones up there to the situation of not being able to govern as before. Growing rebellion of the people that the ruling class, through its class dictatorship (bourgeois state), has to crush daily, by resorting to more repressive laws that deny the rights and freedoms conquered by the class and the people, and by resorting more and more to the armed forces and police to crush them bloodily. Imperialism is scuppering in the midst of a complex system of wars of all types, it is becoming more and more bogged down in wars of aggression against the oppressed nations. For all the above reasons, what was an extraordinary resource in the previous decades, beginning in the 1980s and especially in this century, is increasingly resorted to the possibility of governing by presidential decree, if the legislature cannot achieve unity on certain points, then the president can issue laws by decree – promoting the president's absolutism and it does not matter if he is a democrat or a republican. Was the Obama administration of the Democrats more progressive than the Republican administration of Bush-junior? No, of course not.
For the Black people the "probability" of being assassinated by the state is almost three times as high as for whites, for citizens of Hispanic descent it is still almost twice as highviii - among both democrat and republican governments. Although the numbers of assassinations by the state fluctuate greatly from year to year, on average they are similar, with a general upward trend, how could they be otherwise with increasing reactionarysation.
The number of prisoners has not changed much either, with reference to federal and state prisons, it has fluctuated between 1.4 and 1.6 million since 20001, the last significant change in the statistics took place in the period 1990-2000, in these ten years the number of prisoners increased from just under 776,00 to 1.4 millionix, from 1993-2001 the office of president was held by Democrat Bill Clinton. Here the chauvinism and racism of the imperialist state of the United States, especially its judicial system, is even more significantly visible: in percentage terms, nearly six times as many Black people and nearly three times as many Hispanics are imprisoned compared to whites.x
This is all part of the state's reaction and the war against the American people, which was officially launched in 1972 under the guise of the “war on drugs”, against the drugs that the FBI, CIA and others have brought into the working-class neighbourhoods to sabotage and undermine the struggles of the masses, especially Black people while the lucrative profits from their genocide against the people served to finance their lackeys in the oppressed nations in their terror against the people ("Contra and Iran-Gate Affair).
Slavery is the historical root of the segregation of the Black people – Segregation that survives in the economy and particularly in the superstructure of the USA
Slavery is the origin of the powerful development of capitalism in the United States, Marx pointed out that without the slaves brought from Africa, the development of capitalism in the United States and therefore capitalism in the world cannot be explained. That is, without the exploitation of slave labour U.S. imperialism would not have followed the path to becoming the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower. It is in this undeniable fact of the development of the capitalist economic base in the U.S. where we find the historical root of the continuing segregation of the Black people in the economy and especially in the superstructure, as Lenin so rightly pointed out:
"The United States of America, writes Mr. Himmer, is a “country which has never known feudalism and is free from its economic survivals” (...). This is the very opposite of the truth, for the economic survivals of slavery are not in any way distinguishable from those of feudalism, and in the former slave-owning South of the U.S.A. these survivals are still very powerful. It would not be worth while to dwell on Mr. Himmer’s mistake if it were merely one in a hastily written article. But all liberal and all Narodnik writings in Russia show that the very same “mistake” is being made regularly and with unusual stubbornness with regard to the Russian labour-service system, our own survival of feudalism.
The South of the U.S.A. was slave-owning until slavery was swept away by the Civil War of 1861-65. To this day, the Negroes, who make up no more than from 0.7 to 2.2% of the population in the North and the West, constitute from 22.6 to 33.7% of the population in the South. For the U.S.A. as a whole, the Negroes constitute 10.7% of the population. There is no need to elaborate on the degraded social status of the Negroes: the American bourgeoisie is in no way better in this respect than the bourgeoisie of any other country. Having “freed” the Negroes, it took good care, under “free”, republican-democratic capitalism, to restore everything possible, and do everything possible and impossible for the most shameless and despicable oppression of the Negroes. A minor statistical fact will illustrate their cultural level. While the proportion of illiterates in 1900 among the white population of the U.S.A. of 10 years of age and over was 6.2%, among the Negroes it was as high as 44.5%! More than seven times as high! In the North and the West illiteracy amounted from 4 to 6% (1900), while in the South it was from 22.9 to 23.9%! One can easily imagine the complex of legal and social relationships that corresponds to this disgraceful fact from the sphere of popular literacy
What then is the economic basis that has produced and continues to support this fine “superstructure”?
It is the typically Russian, “purely Russian” labour service system, which is known as share-cropping. [...]
But that is not all. These are not even tenants in the European, civilized, modern-capitalist sense of the word. They are chiefly semi-feudal or—which is the same thing in economic terms—semi-slave share-croppers. In the “free” West, share-croppers were in the minority (25,000 out of a total of 53,000 tenants). In the old North, which was settled long ago, 483,000 out of 766,000 tenant farmers, i.e., 63%, were share-croppers. In the South, 1,021,000 out of 1,537,000 tenant farmers, i.e., 66%, were share-croppers.
To show what the South is like, it is essential to add that its population is fleeing to other capitalist areas and to the towns, just as the peasantry in Russia is fleeing from the most backward central agricultural gubernias, where the survivals of serfdom have been most greatly preserved[...] Immigrants to America, who have such an outstanding role to play in the country’s economy and all its social life, shun the South. [...] For the “emancipated” Negroes, the American South is a kind of prison where they are hemmed in, isolated and deprived of fresh air.[...]
Thus it turns out that there is a startling similarity in the economic status of the Negroes in America and the peasants in the heart of agricultural Russia who “were formerly landowners’ serfs”. xi
This situation of the Black people in the United States, to which we must add the millions of Latin American immigrant peasants in that country, has been maintained by varying the forms of the situation of semi-feudalism in which they live. A speech by Senator Paul Hdouglas on 13 December 1958 states:
"That America in the middle of the century is a surprisingly rich country – it is the richest country in the world (...) and two million people live here in such poverty, that they can only be compared to the servants of the glebe of the time of feudalism, moreover, is that they do not belong anywhere. Their perpetual moving from one place to another is their tragedy. For these people have to go from one place to another and they have nothing that they can call home. These nomads, who go from one place to another in our country, have only the hope to escape death by famine (...) and if they must work hard and long just to be able to maintain the miserable life...".
And who are these people, who are so hungry and desperate? They are the American crop workers and their living conditions do not correspond to those of a developed country. It is estimated that there are two million of them; more than a third of them are American by birth, and most of them are black (...) A commission for the harvest workers was formed by President Eisenhower in 1950 (...) that commission published a full report on that problem (...) on March 26, 1953 (...) But the analysis and conclusions of the commission are exactly as valid now as they were then (this was said in this book that was published in 1967)".
Let's see some of what the Commission said:
"The Commission estimates that harvest workers make up 7% of rural workers in the United States, even though they perform only 5% of rural labor (...) That is why the work of harvest workers cannot be considered insignificant... Harvest workers confront us with a human problem and we cannot ignore it."
A representative of the Congress from the South-West described the system, according to which the harvest workers are employed, as follows: "For centuries they belonged to us as slaves – and today we rent them"xii
Later, the Civil Rights Act was passed by presidential decree No. 8802, which is said to be the most important step towards improving the situation of the Black people. But since the formal adoption of the Black People's Rights Act, we can say, as it was said in the "Hot Autumn 1967" that: "After more than 300 years of oppression, the Black people still have to struggle for their rights, which according to the law have been due to them for a long time". Today, 155 years after the abolition of slavery, although modified as a consequence of the struggle of the Black people, the economic, social and superstructural conditions that Lenin talked about in his work of 1915 still exist, and the struggle of more than 40 million of the Black people for their rights continues.
That is the historical origin of the current situation of oppression of the Black people in the U.S. and the need to lead their struggles against this situation starting from the daily struggle against the greater exploitation and oppression they are subjected to, because if they do not struggle for the defence of conquests and rights their situation will worsen and they will fall even lower than they are, but above all, to carry out this guerrilla war of this part of the deepest and broadest masses in order to raise them to political struggle for the Communist Party and the beginning of the People's War, because only by sweeping away the roots of imperialism in the United States and developing the socialist revolution it will be possible to conquer the freedom of the Black people. There, too, the proletariat, by freeing itself, will free all the others exploited and oppressed by imperialism. It should not be forgotten that a large part of the proletariat in the U.S. comes from the Black people and immigrants, especially “Hispanics”. That together with the women's movement they constitute the broadest and deepest masses that the Party must raise in mighty People's War to make socialist revolution. From this its path, it intends to divert both the proletariat and the Black people, to this counter-revolutionary task serves opportunism and revisionism in the U.S., Avakian's call to unite them in the electoral cart to replace reactionary authorities with the old story of going after the "least bad" candidate, the representative of one of the factions of imperialism, Biden.
Moving on, let us remember Syria and Ukraine or Obama´s drone war, in the so-called "war against international terrorism". From January 2009 to January 2017, the U.S. military carried out at least 1878 drone attacksxiii, each of them had to be approved by Obama's signature. Although the officially published percentage of killed so-called "civilians" is low, we cannot accept this distinction between "targets" and "civilians", these are categories of the imperialists to legitimize their terror, and their murders. Whoever is a freedom fighter for the imperialists today is already a "terrorist" tomorrow, just look at the situation of the Taliban over the decades. Furthermore, different rules are applied to wage war against "terror" than in armed international conflicts involving at least two states. In the war against "terror" there is no rights for prisoners of war or special protection of non-combatants and no international observers – these and thousands of similar facts illustrate the truth which the bourgeoisie are mainly seeking to conceal, namely, that actually terror and bourgeois dictatorship prevail in the most democratic of republics and are openly displayed every time the exploiters think the power of capital is being shaken.xiv This proves the correctness of the definition of the tendency of the reactionary state, this is the tendency that Trump embodies, this is the tendency that Obama embodied before him and this is the tendency that his successor and the following successors, etc. will embody until the power of the imperialists is overthrown.
Once again, we must ask the Avakianists, what is the difference between the representatives of the two imperialist factions? For us, in the different way in which the government of the moment should react to the successive failures of imperialism in its wars of aggression. Today, as we see, Trump presents himself as a dove of peace before the voters and points to the Democrats for their intrigues in the "endless wars abroad”. But what happens is that the US imperialists have to resort to prioritizing waging the war of aggression in the extended middle east, through third party contenders, their lackey forces in the region, as a war between Sunnis against Shias whose objective is the same for both imperialist factions, to recover Iran. Thus, they are trying to lower the tension with the atomic superpower Russia in this scenario, to advance in another way in their aggression without the threat of a direct clash with Russia.
Revisionism is not a faux pas
It's not like Avakian being stupid and doesn't know any of this, but because of his function as a stooge of a faction of the bourgeoisie, Avakian is calling for an anti-fascist front with that very faction of the bourgeoisie to chain the masses to the elections, to dissuade the masses from revolution and to use peaceful means to fight the so-called Trump/Pence regime. He is supposedly of the opinion that the forthcoming elections are fateful for the American people, but he cannot explain what makes these elections different from all others, unlike the real communists can, because these elections are indeed crucial, crucial for the imperialists. In view of their further decay, which is expressed in concentrated form in U.S. imperialist policies, they need a president who is blessed or "legitimized" by the largest number of voters at the polls.
Avakian preaches:"At this critical hour, every appropriate means of non-violent action must be utilized to remove this regime from power. And if, in spite of mass protest demanding the removal of the Trump/Pence regime, this regime remains in power when it is time for voting, then—without placing fundamental reliance on this—using all appropriate means to work for the removal of this regime must include voting against Trump (assuming the election is actually held). To be clear, this means not a “protest vote” for some candidate who has no chance of winning, but actually voting for the Democratic Party candidate, Biden, in order to effectively vote against Trump.
This is not because Biden (and the Democratic Party in general) have suddenly become something other than what they are: representatives and instruments of this exploitative, oppressive, and literally murderous system of capitalism-imperialism. The electoral process continues to be what we revcoms have called it—BEB (Bourgeois Electoral Bullshit). It remains the case that no fundamental change for the better can come about through this electoral process, and that, in general and overall, voting under this system serves to reinforce this system, especially if voting is seen as a way—and more so if it is seen at the (only) way—to bring about meaningful change. But this election is different." xv
As he himself says, voting serves to legitimize the system and yes, these elections, as it is said before, are different, imperialism is in an even deeper crisis, they need a new legitimate government, through the highest possible turnout, it doesn't matter who, but that is the nature of imperialism and doesn't change anything for the revolutionaries. Imperialism is and will remain the global system, the form of government is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the main contradiction in the United States is and will remain that one between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and even if the form of government were to change from the "presidential republic" to fascism, which it did not do under Trump and supposedly will not do, at least there is nothing to suggest that it will, of course, make the revolution more difficult, but will not change the necessity of this and the election boycott. This situation can be well compared to the old Europe, where Podemos, AFD, 5-Star Movement and also Syriza (although the situation in Greece is a special one) and all of them are making big promises and nothing changes, except that the voter participation increases a little bit and that' s what it's all about, dragging the masses to the ballot box like cattle to the slaughter. This is what the revisionists are doing, they are trying to tie the masses to the elections.
As the Maoists rightly and correctly point out in the very entrails of the monster: "Avakian, the revisionist rat that he is, has forgotten the fundamental principle of Marxism, that it is right to rebel. Not only has he dived head first into the sewage of electoralism, but he has also issued calls for “non-violent action.” The masses who make history do not go in for either voting or non-violence, as the low voter turn out and the May Uprisings have already confirmed. The bigger the march, the less voters are present and more violent expressions of the people’s rage are evident. Avakian has never been in touch with the people, and has no ability to gauge their mood. For Maoists, revolutionary violence is an immutable law of history and it is always right to rebel against reaction. It is Avakian’s rejection of these principles and his lack of interest in the masses that convinces him to endorse Biden, who he openly proclaims an imperialist, all the while calling for the use of “appropriate non-violent action.” xvi
Also the democrats want and have to be ideal general capitalists
Avakian himself, in the manner that Lenin made a point of emphasizing that it is difficult to catch an opportunist, because they always act like a snake, crawling between different arguments, always looking for the resultant one, says that Biden is not good and that he is really no better than Trump. Avakian is doing something particularly clever and very perfidious, he generates himself as the sharpest critic of the system of government and elections in general and of Joe Biden explicitly and then calls for his election and when even he, making the sharpest criticism of this, when "revolutionary communists" calling to vote, who else could speak out against it? Neither is this a mistake nor ignorance; unlike Trump, Biden is not a blank slate in U.S. politics.
"Biden infamously championed the 1994 crime bill which has been cited as kickstarting the era of mass incarceration. As chair of the Senate judiciary committee, he drafted the bill, and in a speech on the senate floor, Biden said “One step is “you must take back the streets” and you take back the streets by: more cops, more prisons, more physical protection for the people.” History shows that the imperialists simply come back to sweep the messes they created the first-time around right back under the rug." xvii
This "crime law" is the main reason for the aforementioned leap in the number of detainees during Bill Clinton's reign, making his ostensible support for black protests in the United States all the more hypocritical, as comrades there describe it:
"Joe Biden has recently come under fire for comments he made while appearing on a May 22 episode of New York City radio show The Breakfast Club, in which he said “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Despite the upcoming presidential election, Biden has struggled to maintain visibility and relevance, especially over the past several months of deepening imperialist crisis amidst the coronavirus outbreak. Since 2016, politicians from the Democratic Party have made regular appearances on The Breakfast Club to appeal to the show’s younger, Black audience in an attempt to win votes and a false sense of legitimacy, portraying themselves as champions of the oppressed. [...] In this case both Biden and Trump clearly wield identity politics as tools in the upcoming election. The appeals that ruling class politicians are making have not swayed Black working class people, many of whom do not vote. Studies have shown that most people who don’t vote aren’t white despite making up only one-fourth of the voting population. Black people made up 15 percent of nonvoters in 2016, while making up only 10 percent of voters in the same year."xviii
In the aftermath of September 11, as Democratic Senator for Delaware, he supported George W. Bush in the imperialist war of aggression against Afghanistan and called for even more ground forces. Bush is a member of the Republican Party, but the bourgeoisie's factions were united in the attack on Afghanistan, as well as in the case of Iraq, where Biden voted in the Senate for the resolution on the Iraq war, which he later claimed to regret, but this is probably not because of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, but rather because Iraq has become a disaster and a billion-dollar grave for Yankee imperialism. From 2009 to 2017 he was vice president under Obama and saw himself as an important advisor in internal and foreign policy, but unlike his predecessor Dick Cheney he acted more in silence. Among the Democrats, whether Obama, Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy or anybody else, the situation of the Black people and migrants was not much better than among the Republicans, the Democrats use the Black people and migrants merely as cattle for slaughter. They cover and hide their chauvinism, their racism mostly better (Political Correctness) and pretend to be representatives of the whole people, of all ethnic groups or races, as it is often called wrong in the United States.
And the potential vice president, Kamala Harris, is also not known for progressive politics. She began her career as assistant to the Alameda County Attorney General, which was also her stepping stone to the Senate. In 2010 she was elected as California's Attorney General. She was chief of staff and head of ministry, thereby combining legislative and executive power in one person, which is actually a contradiction of bourgeois democracy and the separation of powers, but which is in line with the reactionarysation of the state and the centralization of power in the hands of the president.
"As California’s Attorney General (AG), Harris fulfilled her function as prosecutor against the working masses of California. She enforced the sentences of wrongfully convicted prisoners while also refusing to release non-violent offenders. Her advocacy for incarceration of the working class was accompanied with slaps on the wrists for officer misconduct. She refused to take action against police officer killings in Los Angeles and San Francisco, against prosecutors who forced false confessions, and against a technician who stole evidence in the form of cocaine from crime labs. She also extended protection to Alameda police officers after it had come to light that an officer had sexually abused a young girl. Her crimes against the people of California do not end there. She used her power as AG to increase ICE sting operations. During her time as district attorney (DA)
in San Francisco she backed former mayor Gavin Newsom’s policy allowing police officers to cooperate with ICE concerning the arrests of undocumented youth. As DA she implemented an anti-truancy policy, prosecuting and arresting working class mothers, particularly Black mothers."xix
Like Joe Biden, she serves the interests of the imperialists and in no way, ever, serves the people, even from a bourgeois point of view she is arch-reactionary, and the fact that she is black changes nothing. This is just another attempt by the Democrats to cosy up to the black protest movement in the United States and win votes in the bourgeois electoral farce – she is a brave warrior in the war against the people
The masses want to struggle – the communists have to lead
This open support of the imperialist bourgeoisie by the RCP-USA has nothing, really nothing to do with proletarian ideology, that is parliamentary cretinism, nothing more than a new perfidious attempt to combat Red Flags with Red Flags. Even though he claims that revolution remains the goal.
"Our fundamental goal, and guiding star, remains: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! In everything we do, including in all the struggles we take part in that are themselves short of revolution, our consistent approach is, and must be, to make all this serve that fundamental goal of revolution and the emancipation of all humanity."xx
He proves the exact contrary when he seeks to postpone the revolution to infinity and presents himself in public as an enemy of the international proletariat and the peoples of the world by attempting to remove the socialist revolution in the United States, in the service of world proletarian revolution, from the agenda. He is only seeking excuses to wage the justified rebellion of the masses and executing revolutionary violence, how could it be otherwise with his positive image of the bourgeoisie, due to the fact that he takes a bourgeois class standpoint, and so believes the bourgeoisie speaks for all humanity, and by taking such a class standpoint, there is the lesser evil for individuals, especially in relation to the working class aristocracy, which is mostly concreted in bribes from extra-profits from the oppressed nations. In connection with the so-called New Synthesis, this statement is not only a temporary rejection of the revolution, but the general negation of the necessity of it.
"But communism is not inevitable. There is no "god-like" History with a “Capital H” pushing things to communism. [...] These wrong epistemological views include the idea that “truth has a class character.” Actually, truth is just truth and bullshit is just bullshit—regardless of who says it." xxi
If, as he claims, society does not tend toward communism and does not need people who can be made the tools of necessity, as Plekhanov said, and truth does not have a class character, then one can be satisfied with parliamentary struggle and electoral farce within the bourgeois system. The law of contradiction established by Chairman Mao is skilfully and deliberately ignored, which is a direct and proven negation of the nonsense Avakian and his disciples propagate. This all somehow overlaps with Bernsteinism and Kautsky, somehow all just "ultra-imperialism" under a new name, the bourgeoisie and intellectuals would already realize that communism is best. All this is an unforgivable crime against the international proletariat and the peoples of the world – Revisionists are not lost brothers, they are enemies of the revolution.
The
objective situation shows that the masses in the United States want
to struggle
for the defence
of their rights, liberties, benefits and conquest. For the
revolutionaries this is a great opportunity: to struggle
with the masses and take the initiative to become the recognized
vanguard of the proletariat, to win the masses over to the revolution
and to reconstitute the Communist Party of the United States on the
basis of the ideology of the international proletariat,
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principal Maoism with the universal valid
contributions of Chairman Gonzalo, to initiate the People's
War,
in the service of the world proletarian revolution.
ELECTIONS NO! PEOPLE'S WAR YES!
BOYCOTT THE ELECTIONS OF THE BOURGEOISIE!
FOR THE RECONSTITUTION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!
DEATH TO REVISIONISM!
LEARN FROM CHAIRMAN GONZALO!
i V.I. Lenin, The State
ii Communist Party of Peru, Elections No, People’s War yes!
iii Klassenstandpunkt Nr. 14 (Class Standpoint No. 14), Die strategische Bedeutung des Wahlboykotts (The strategic meaning of election boycott)
iv Communist Party of Peru (in Peru there is an obligation to vote, our note)
v Bob Avakian, In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
vi Communist Party of Peru, International Line
vii V.I. Lenin, The State
viii Statista, Blacks become more often victims of deadly police violence
ix Statista, Number of prisoners under jurisdiction of federal or state correctional authorities from 1990 to 2018
x Statista, Number of detainees in the USA by ethnicity in 2018
xi V.I. Lenin, New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture
xii Blandena Lee, Americanos de Segunda Clase (Second Class Americans)
xiii The Bureau of Investigation, Human Rights – Drone Warfare
xiv V.I. Lenin, Thesis and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
xv Bob Avakian, ON THE IMMEDIATE CRITICAL SITUATION, THE URGENT NEED TO DRIVE OUT THE FASCIST TRUMP/PENCE REGIME, VOTING IN THIS ELECTION, AND THE FUNDAMENTAL NEED FOR REVOLUTION
xvi Tribune Of The People, On the Electoral Cretins Part 1: Avakianism Further Exposes its Naked Revisionism
xvii Tribune Of The People, Opinion: Biden’s Own Version of ‘Law and Order’ to Compete with Trump’s
xviii Tribune Of The People, Biden Claims Entitlement to Black Support
xix Tribune Of The People, Top Cop’ Kamala Harris Announced as Democratic VP Candidate
xx Bob Avakian, ON THE IMMEDIATE CRITICAL SITUATION, THE URGENT NEED TO DRIVE OUT THE FASCIST TRUMP/PENCE REGIME, VOTING IN THIS ELECTION, AND THE FUNDAMENTAL NEED FOR REVOLUTION
xxi RevCom, What is Bob Avakian´s New Synthesis?