The Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan [CmPA] has
begun its response to that pompous 58 page critique the Revolutionary Communist
Party USA [RCP-USA] which was sent to the Afghanis and those international
revolutionary parties and organizations who have been trying to restart the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement [RIM]. In the process of this
restarting, the CmPA and other organizations have launched significant
theoretical attacks against the RCP-USA's "Avakianite" revisionism (a term that
is indeed used by the CmPA in its current response) and thus the RCP-USA, eager
to defend its dogmatic obsession with a theoretical deviation that is neither
"new" or a very significant "synthesis", wrote over 50 pages attacking the
international maoist movement.
Although I am generally of the
mind that people should just ignore the RCP-USA now since, whatever its past
significance, it is now
a dwindling and cultish organization filled with dogmatists
who, incapable of critical thought, are similar in form to the Spartacist
League. At the same time, however, because of its past in the RIM and
connection to other organizations––because its "new synthesis" is now wreaking
havoc in organizations like the Communist Party of Iran
(Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)––it is worth confronting. Better yet, the CmPA's
response to the RCP-USA is similar to those polemical exchanges Marx and Engels
would have had, for example, with Proudhon and Duhring; now we do not read
The Poverty of Philosophy or
Anti-Duhring primarily because they
are responses to Proudhon and Duhring––we read them because of the theoretical
content they exposit in the process of their response.
Indeed, there is
a lot of important theoretical content in the first chapter of the CmPA's
response to the RCP-USA that it is worth reading for its own sake. (And yes,
this giant document is only the first chapter of a serialized response.) Due to
this importance, and because the formatting on t
he CmPA's home-page is rather messy, I'm providing a link to a
clean pdf copy where the formatting is fixed up for english readers:
Download PDF
of "A Response to the RCP-USA" by the Communist (Maoist) Party of
Afghanistan.
What I find most interesting in this part of the CmPA's
response to the RCP-USA is that it spends a lot of time examining the
dialectical tension of "continuity-rupture" which I have often discussed on this
blog and elsewhere. They also outline what they mean by "post-MLM" and why
their claim that "post-MLM" is revisionism is not due to unimaginative dogmatism
but to their belief that people who ascribe to this post-MLM theory
(paradigmatically, for the document, the RCP-USA, but they feel it also applies
to a general revisionist tendency) are engaged in rupturing from Marxism as a
whole by refusing to recognize any historical continuity. Thus, whereas the
RCP-USA had sophistically accused the CmPA of ignoring the dialectical unity of
"continuity-rupture", the CmPA responds by outlining what this dialectical unity
is (even giving a brief explanation of dialectics) and demonstrating that the
RCP-USA's argument is dishonest and rhetorical because the RCP-USA, in the very
act of flaunting this concept to attack their theoretical enemies, are actually
not recognizing this dialectical unity.
I look forward to the next
chapters and hope that, when the document is finished, the CmPA will consider
collecting the entire document into a single booklet.
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-communist-maoist-party-of.html
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