Ajith has a new collection of essays coming out with Foreign Languages Press.
As I have argued and asserted for a long time, Ajith is one of the great thinkers of the modern Maoist movement. His Against Avakianism,
though it is largely concerned with the deviation of Avakian's "New
Synthesis", uses this debate within the ICM to establish significant
principles just as Engels' Anti-Duhring established similar principals against Eugen Duhring who is now a nobody. Just as we don't read Anti-Duhring to learn about the thoughts of Eugen Duhring, we shouldn't read Against Avakianism as a historiography of Bob Avakian's thought: it is what is established against this deviation that matters.
For
those outside of the Maoist International Communist Movement (ICM), it
might seem a bit strange that an entire book (the Foreign Languages
Press version of Against Avakianism is
222 pages) is ostensibly about Bob Avakian's "New Synthesis". The fact
that the RCP-USA has become a small organization in the US known for
cultish behaviour (remember that time they took Avakian's image to
Burning Man?) would seem to imply nobody should waste their time
engaging with the bombastic proclamations of their chairperson. Within
the ICM, though, such an engagement was necessary. At one point of time
the RCP-USA was a significant anti-revisionist organization. Even when
it began to contract significantly at the end of the 70s (Leonard and
Gallagher's Heavy Radicals examine the events that brought the
RCP-USA's degeneration about, which included serious FBI infiltration)
it still used its resources and contacts to establish an international
body, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), wherein
multiple revolutionary organizations around the world could meet,
establish the basic notion of contemporary Maoism, and support each
other. The fact that it established the basis of the RIM, however, did
not mean it was in control of the RIM since organizations such as the
PCP and the CPN(Maoist) were emerging as the organization's political
leaders. It did, because of its position within an imperialist country,
maintain control of the CoRIM and thus used this to attempt to shut down
debate and in fact liquidate the RIM when it could not longer agree
with the political line of its members. Moreover, it used its influence
to spread Avakian's particular post-Maoist ideology to numerous other
organizations, which is why Ajith (and others) believed it was important
to wage an ideological line struggle against the RCP-USA's Avakianist
dogma. Not because the RCP-USA mattered anymore within the terrain of
class struggle in the US, but because it had the assets and resources to
export its ideology to other groups in the ICM. Similarly, it was not
Eugen Duhring himself that mattered to Engels when he wrote Anti-Duhring;
it was the possible affect Duhring would have on the working-class
movement that mattered. And what was established in that text about
historical materialism is now historically more important than Duhring's
pompous and useless philosophizing.
Indeed, within Against Avakianism we
discover multiple aspects of MLM worked out and grasped scientifically,
so as to be asserted against Avakian's supposed "New Synthesis". The
book concludes, after all, with the insight many criticisms of the "New
Synthesis" have made––that "Avakianism is neither new nor in any way a
synthesis" (176)––but has grounded this insight in a demonstration about
what makes Maoism the current stage of revolutionary communism and why
claims about successive stages cannot be made prematurely. Hence, Against Avakianism functions,
in its own words, "to put stress on Maoism in order to sharpen the
struggle against revisionism and all other alien thinking." (Ibid.) Such
a stress is the book's main focus, and a lot of ground regarding
dialectics, revolutionary science, and categories of dialectics and
science is covered in the process.
Rereading Against Avakianism now,
years after the line struggle against Avakian's "New Synthesis" was
first waged, brings home my contention that Ajith is one of the great
thinkers of modern Maoism. There is so much in this book that I
synthesized into my own thought that was foundational to Continuity and Rupture.
While it indeed the case that I cited Ajith in that book, I did not
cite him as much as I could have. Largely because I had synthesized his
insights with other Maoist theory I was reading at the time, and thus to
my own thought and my own organizational experiences, there was much in
that book that was directly influenced by Against Avakianism but
I didn't consciously realize it at the time because it had become
assimilated to an understanding developed through multiple sources.
Actually, we can go back a bit earlier to The Communist Necessity, completed and published just a year after Against Avakianism first
appeared, and Ajith's fingerprints are all over that book as well. "The
possibility of humanity becoming extinct through the same
contradictions that make communism possible is real," Ajith writes:
"Capital's endless drive for self-expansion that lies at the root of
these contradictions could very well lead to an environmental
catastrophe making human life impossible." (153) But he asserts this
possibility while still asserting that this does not change the fact
that communism is historically necessitated––precisely the point of The Communist Necessity.
I really wish this influence hadn't been pushed into my unconscious and
I was consciously aware of it when I wrote that book so I could cite
and celebrate Ajith further. As a side point, this is a perfect example
of how, despite our best attempts at indicating our influences, we often
forget some of the influences on our thought. We are not unique, all of
our thinking is derived from what we study, and if we study a lot then
some influences might be temporarily forgotten.
When I wrote Critique of Maoist Reason I tried to make these influences more evident, especially the influence of Ajith. I think anyone who reads Critique but
who hasn't read Ajith should go back and read him. I wanted that book
to be an encouragement to read the contemporary thinkers of the Maoist
movement, and the work produced under the name of the main MLM
organizations around the world. Reading these thinkers and
organizations––rather than reading, for example, the thoughts on Maoism
put out by small US and European organizations––is more meaningful for
thinking Maoism as Maoism. Ajith looms large in this thought, largely
because he has been doing for a long time what I think we all need to be
doing, rigorously thinking Maoist thought and thus the meaning of MLM.
He has been, for a very long time, an organic intellectual who
understands philosophical practice within the terrain of revolutionary
science.
Hence, I am super-excited that Ajith
has a new collection of essays coming out with Foreign Languages Press. I
am delighted that I have been asked to host the virtual book launch. Here we have a chance to listen to an organic intellectual and engage with his thoughts in real time.
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