CPN(M) - Worker #10
The Worker, #10, May 2006
Guest Article
ON EPISTEMOLOGY—ON KNOWING AND CHANGING THE WORLDBob Avakian
Chairman, Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
[The following is based on a discussion by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Bob Avakian, with some comrades on the subject of epistemology. Epistemology refers to a theory of knowledge, to an understanding of how people acquire knowledge, what is the nature of truth and how people come to know the truth. The following is excerpted from remarks reprinted in Revolutionary Worker issue 1262, 19 December 2004 (full text available at www.rwor.org), based on notes taken during the discussion. Footnotes as well as notes in brackets within the text have been added. —Ed.]
Bob Avakian: It does focus up a lot of questions, this attitude toward the intellectuals. From the time of Conquer the World1 I have been bringing forward an epistemological rupture with a lot of the history of the ICM [International Communist Movement], including China and the GPCR [Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution], which had this thing arguing that there is such a thing as proletarian truth and bourgeois truth—this was in a major circular2 put out by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In some polemics we wrote around the coup in China, we uncritically echoed this. Later on, we criticized ourselves for that. This rupture actually began with Conquer the World. CTW was an epistemological break—we have to go for the truth, rather than hiding things, etc.—a whole approach of interrogating our whole history. That's why it was taken as a breath of fresh air by some, while other people hated it, saying it reduced the history of the international communist movement and our banner of communism to a "tattered flag"—which was not the point at all. End to the Horror3 has a whole point that there is no such thing as class truth, but there is a methodology that lets you get at the truth more fully; the open letters to Sagan and Gould (and Isaac Asimov) wrestled with this more fully.4 Then there is the point I have been stressing by referring to, and expressing some agreement with, the argument of John Stuart Mill on contesting of ideas—on the importance of people being able to hear arguments not just as they are characterized by those who oppose them but as they are put forward by those who strongly believe in them. It is not that Mao never had any of this approach, but still what I have been bringing forward represents an epistemological break. Even though many people welcomed CTW on one level, it divided into two again, and that division became sharper as things went on. I was pursuing CTW where it was taking me, I didn't have an a priori understanding [a priori here refers to forming conclusions in advance of investigating something]. There's a logic to what I was pursuing in CTW—it takes you to a certain place, and if you resist that you go to another place. There's been a clinging to this old way the communist movement has approached these questions, epitomized in class truth—this is still a real problem.
Your attitude towards intellectuals has to do with the philosophical question of what you think we're trying to do, and what is it the proletariat represents. What is the "godlike position of the proletariat," as I referred to it in "Strategic Questions"5? On one level, you're sort of sitting on a hill watching this procession go by of the development of humanity. Some of it you can see more dimly and some more clearly—you look at this whole sweep and then at a certain point this group called the proletariat emerges from within this set of social relations that can take it to a particular place, to a whole different world. But you shouldn't reify the proletariat: Yes it's made up of real people, but it's not a matter of individual proletarians but of the proletariat as a class, of its position in society and of where its interests lie, in the most fundamental sense, as a class. On another level, looking at the sweep of history, you see the role of intellectuals as well. Are they basically making trouble for us? This is how some people see it—and this has been a definite tendency, and real problem, in the history of our movement.
But from the standpoint of a sweeping view of history, you look at this a different way. For example, there is this physicist Brian Greene who has written some books popularizing questions of physics, and he speaks to this big contradiction the physicists can't yet resolve between relativity and quantum mechanics, so the question they're facing is: how do you get the next level of synthesis? What do we think of that—is that a big waste of time unless we can use that narrowly? Yes, people like this, people in these fields generally, need to be struggled with—but in a good way. If we were working in the right way in these spheres we'd be having a lot of good struggle with people around all kinds of questions, including questions arising in their work, but first of all we would be seriously engaging the work they are doing and the questions they are wrestling with. We would do this in a different way than it's often been done in the history of our movement. Is it important for what we're trying to accomplish or should be trying to accomplish whether these physicists understand more about the world? Yes. Do they need "loose reins" to accomplish this? Yes. Do we need to struggle with them? Yes. Do we need to have them come down and learn from the masses? Yes. But there is a legitimate part to the point that Bill Martin has made, in an introduction to a book that will be coming out soon—consisting of a conversation between him and me—the point that, yes, there are problems of intellectuals getting isolated in their ivory towers but at the same time there is a definite need for intellectuals to have the right atmosphere and space in which to do their work.6 Yes, we have to get down from the mountain and get with the masses, but you have to go up to the mountain too or we won't do anything good. Stalin—some of his errors are his own, resulting to a large degree from his methodological problems, and some of it was carried forward from Lenin (I spoke to some of this in CTW.
That stuff [a narrow view] on intellectuals has pretty much been the conventional wisdom in our movement, including in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But for a couple of decades there's been a clear motion of what I've been fighting for that's going in a different way. Do you recognize that, or do you reject that and go for something else? There are different lines and roads represented by this. XXX said to me, one of the most important things is for you to do what you do; but I said at least as important is for you to do this too. We need a solid core united around the correct line—and if we don't have that, then it's not going to be good if people take a lot of initiative. If people are with this, we'll unleash a lot of stuff and it'll go in different directions, even funny directions, but we'll struggle and get somewhere.
How do you put your arms around the history of humanity? What about these indigenous people whose religion is so crucial to their sense of identity? Difficult—but we don't have a shot without this kind of outlook and methodology I'm arguing for. Without this, you're either going to uncritically tail this or brutally suppress it when it gets in the way. Mao had some sense of this. He sharply criticized the Soviet Union's policy of forcing people to raise pigs in the Muslim areas. But we need to go further with this. Mao's been dead for 30 years and Lenin 80—what are we doing if we don't go beyond them?
This was a beginning rupture, an epistemological break, that was represented by CTW. The point is to change the world, and we need to understand reality. Darwin and Newton brought forth some understanding of reality. This has been shown to be limited and wrong in some ways, particularly in the case of Newton—Darwin was basically correct, and it's very important to uphold this, especially in the face of attacks on evolution by religious fundamentalists, but the understanding of evolution has progressed beyond Darwin. Yes we don't want people in ivory towers, but Bill Martin's point on this [that intellectuals do need the setting in which to do their work]—we have to solve that contradiction. We have to put this problem to the masses. And if we don't solve it right, even after power has been seized and we're leading a socialist society, the people will overthrow us or sit aside when a bigger army comes in. Saddam Hussein is an example: he was an oppressor of the people, and while the people didn't overthrow him, they also didn't rise to defend him when a more powerful oppressor, the U.S. imperialists, invaded to get rid of him. That will happen to us if we don't solve the real problems—including the day to day problems of the masses—in socialist society, but we have to lead the masses and even struggle with these intermediate strata by putting the contradictions to them. Here's how we're dealing with this, what's your criticism of that? As opposed to bringing out the army to suppress things. I'm no idealist—sometimes you do need the army—but it shouldn't be the first thing you reach for. You have to pose the contradictions and ask: what's your idea for how to solve this? Here people are going without health care, and how do we solve that without reproducing the same gross inequalities so that a few people can do their work in the sciences, and on the other hand so that people in the sciences aren't stopped from their work. Or what is your solution to dealing with imperialist encirclement of our socialist state? Here's the contradiction—let's wrangle with it. How do we handle this?
It's not like Mao didn't have a lot of that, but it's a little bit different way, what I'm putting forward. You trust the masses that if you put the problems to them you can struggle with them, learn from them, lead them and win a big section of the masses as you do this. I don't want to be by myself on this road—that's no good, that won't take things where they need to go—I want more people on this road, enabling me to do work and doing work themselves. Many people here and people in our Party and more people beyond the Party can contribute to all this. This is a very good process. In response to a talk I gave, "Elections, Democracy and Dictatorship, Resistance and Revolution,"7 a professor, referring to my criticisms of Stalin and his methodology, and the need for us to do better than this, raised that it wouldn't have been such a problem if Stalin had had people around him who would challenge him; and this professor went on to put forward: "Here's my challenge—how would you do better than in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and '30s and China in the GPCR?" And he elaborated on this: "Here's how I see the problem: people are going to start speaking out against you when you're in power, and pretty soon you're going to bring out the army and suppress them." This is an important point—a real contradiction—and there needs to be ongoing dialogue about that with people like this, and more generally. I believe we can find a good resolution to this contradiction—but it won't be easy, it will take real work and struggle, all the way through, to handle this correctly.
Here is a big problem: when the time comes, when there is a revolutionary situation, our material force has to be able to meet and defeat the imperialists, it has to be the leading force in doing that, so that we can get the solid core and then open things up. If you open up the basic question of socialism to an electoral contest, you'll sink the ship. We have to bring forward the material force to defeat the enemy and set the terms for the new society. Then we have to do all this other stuff, to "open the society up" and lead the masses in accordance with this—that's the whole point on the moving process of solid core and elasticity. [This refers to the concept and approach of "a solid core with a lot of elasticity," which Chairman Avakian has been giving emphasis to—a principle he insists should be applied in socialist society as well as to the revolutionary process overall, aiming for the final goal of a communist world. For more on this, see the talk by Chairman Avakian, "Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism." The full text of this talk is available online at www.rwor.org and selections from this talk have been published in the Revolutionary Worker newspaper in issues #1250-52, 1254-55, 1257-58 and 1260.]
This question of "solid core with a lot of elasticity" is not something that's settled once and for all—the more solid core we get, in every situation, on every level, the more elasticity we should have. Can't have a solid core that has no elasticity within it. The core can't be so strong that everything is like a black hole and sucks in the light.
It is hard to do both sides of that. Look at this aspect of having the material force to defeat and then set the terms. This is like the movie "Remember the Titans"—the decision was made to integrate the high school in Virginia and the football team, and that the football coach was going to be Black. Then they struggled things out from there. It provided better terms than simply saying, "Do you want this integration"—a lot of white people would have said "no!" If you have the ability to set the terms, it's more favorable. "No, in socialist society you can't have religion taught in schools—if you want to, you can talk to your kids about that on your own time. But they're going to come to the public school and learn science and history and a true approach to reality." How does that fit in with Catholics who can't be happy without the Pope? There's no Catholicism without the Pope. And that's a big contradiction. These are difficult contradictions, but we won't have a chance if we're not on this road. I wasn't being insincere in the talk on the dictatorship of the proletariat8 in saying some of these ideas I'm bringing forward are, at this point, posing contradictions and indicating an approach, not attempting at this point to give a complete answer to all these things. But this is the way I am convinced we have to go about this whole thing we are doing. Both because it takes us where we want to go and because it's in line with our final goal of communism.
Engels' Anti-Duhring is very open about the fact that much of what was understood then would be surpassed and replaced by further understanding. This is the right orientation and approach—it is dialectical as well as materialist, it is not religious. The stuff from Newton is true on one level, but there's a larger reality he didn't grasp. This applies to us—there are many things that we don't understand, many things that will be discovered later that will surpass and replace some things we think are true now—but you have to go on this road to get there. It's a road with many divergent paths. How do you keep them all going in a good direction without being tightly in formation? The more you grasp that this is correct, the more you can have the solid core which enables you to do these things. This is about whether our communist project is going to have any viability and desirability, and on the positive side it is opening up further pathways to solving these contradictions, and providing a path for others.
Those are the roads and that's how I see it—are we going to get on this road, or not? Is this right what I'm saying? Is this how we should envision what we're all about? Or is it unrealistic, idealistic, nothing to do with the real world, not what we should aim for, not try to get there—are the people right who say "you want to do this, but you can't"? Not only can we, it is the only way we can do what we need to do. You can't repeat the experience [of the proletarian revolution and socialist society]. You couldn't do the Paris Commune again to do the Soviet Union. Too much has gone on, even besides the propaganda of the bourgeoisie, people are not going to get inspired to do the same thing. They should recognize that in its time and place the inspiration was the main thing. The Chinese revolution was much better than what they had before and much better than what they have now in China. But it's not enough to inspire people to do that again. And they shouldn't want to. Is what I'm arguing for a bunch of idealism? Or is it the only way we can go forward? What's the truth of this?
Objective and Partisan: Getting at the Truth BA Continues: Some of this in the Feigon book on Mao9, where Mao talks to his niece on reading the Bible—responding to her question about how to "inoculate" herself against it: "just go deeply into it and you'll come out the other side"—Mao had some of this approach too, mixed in with other stuff. This has been there as an element: Mao had this aspect of not fearing to delve into things and seeking out the truth—perhaps he had this even more than Lenin—but then there's still a question of "political truth" or "class truth" getting in the way of this. In the name of the masses—and even out of concern for the masses. Mao had great concern for the masses, but these things were contending in Mao too. "You don't need any inoculation! Just go read it, you'll come out the other side." [There are] definitely correct things like that with Mao, but then there's also some "proletarian class truth," if not in the most narrow Stalinesque Lysenko way.10
A comrade: What about objective and partisan [that the outlook of the proletariat, of communists, is objective and partisan]?
BA: We should be able to get at the truth better than anybody. Our approach is not partisan in a utilitarian sense. We have an outlook and method that corresponds to a class that's emerged in history in the broadest sense, and it can't get itself out of this without overcoming all this stuff and transforming it all. This outlook corresponds to the proletariat's interests, but not narrowly.
In the Feigon book, he says Mao came up inside of the Soviet model, so to speak, and then Mao said no, we gotta break out of this whole way of building socialism. Mao was the first attempt in this. Then there is a whole other dimension as a strategic approach that incorporates things from the GPCR. It was and has been for a long time and acutely something I've had to fight for. What I'm calling for is really hard to do, but it's the only way we can really do this. In the future, people will go further with everything that's involved in getting to communism; but at this point, this is what we have to go through. Even the best of the GPCR posed against this turns into its opposite. Revolution develops through stages and people get stuck—and things turn into their opposites and what's advanced doesn't remain advanced when there are new necessities posed that you have to break through on.
This approach will involve a tremendous struggle with the masses. When speaking to that professor's question [how would you do better than in the Soviet Union and in China] I had to speak to this: there are masses who have been lorded over by people who know more than they do, and they're not going to want to listen under socialism to people saying the new society is no good. I said: I don't believe in tailing people just because they've been oppressed. They're going to be leading society and we have to struggle with them over what this is all about. In order to do this, people have to understand how to make the distinction between voicing reactionary opinions and actively working to overthrow the whole socialist, system; and even more fundamentally they have to know why it is important to make that distinction. He asked this question so I explored it as best I could. Because this is something that adds a whole strategic dimension and embodies but goes further than the GPCR; and if, in the name of upholding the GPCR, you resist the part that goes further—then you're opposing the whole thing.
It's a tricky contradiction that, on the one hand, we have to always go for the truth—and not for "political truth" or "class truth"—and, on the other hand, we have to know how to lead without giving up the core. In taking all this up, some people are veering to social-democracy and others refuse to recognize there's any problem here and don't even want to criticize Stalin. And, in this situation, you can convince yourself that if you criticize Stalin then you have someone to the left of you and someone to the right and then you must be correct(!)—as opposed to whether you're correct or not is based on whether it's true.
Objective and partisan is like this: If it's true, it should be part of advancing, getting us where we're going. If it's not true, it would get in the way. If it's true, even if it reveals the ugliest side of what we're about—if that black book thing were true we'd have to say how did that happen and how do we prevent that?—but the thing is, what matters is that whatever is true, we can encompass it and make it part of what we're all about, even when it's truths that reveal bad aspects of what we've done. [The "black book" refers to a book purporting to tell the "true story of communism"—and to attack it as a monstrous crime—it is a combination of slanders and lies mixed in with some references to actual shortcomings and errors in the experience of socialist society so far.]
That's the synthesis of partisan and objective. Either we actually believe the most fundamental truth about capitalism and communism is what it is—either we have a scientifically grounded understanding of why communism should and can replace capitalism, all over the world—or we don't, in which case we end up fearing truth.
We have to rupture more fully with instrumentalism—with notions of making reality an "instrument" of our objectives, of distorting reality to try to make it serve our ends, of "political truth." The dynamic of "truths that make us cringe" is part of what can be driving us forward. This can help call forth that ferment so that we can understand reality. This is scientific materialist objectivity. If you go deeply enough and understand that these contradictions now posed could lead to a different era based on the resolution of those contradictions, then you want to set in motion a dynamic where people are bringing out your shortcomings. Not that every mistake should be brought out in a way to overwhelm everything we're trying to do, but in a strategic sense [we should] welcome this and not try to manage it too much—you want that, the back and forth. On the web, there have been slanders and outright pig-type stuff in relation to me, which doesn't do any good for anybody trying to do good in the world, and this kind of harmful stuff should not be tolerated by anybody who does want to do good in the world. But there has also been political debate about my role as a leader and about communist leaders in general. This has generally been fairly low-level, but at least it has had some substance, and is it bad to have this kind of debate not only now but also under socialism? No this is a good thing. Not only because people will be able to learn more in general, but we'll be able to learn more. What is coming forward? What are the ways that we have to go forward? What is the baggage that we have to cast off? If you get the epistemology, you really want this. This is not just a tactical, but a strategic view flowing from this epistemological view of what this process should be—and we'll get where we need to go with this ferment.
Not just tolerating this, but being enthusiastic—not about everything insulting, but generally. Do we think this is a good process, not only now but under the dictatorship of the proletariat? Or should we just stick with the seemingly safer path of what we've done before?
I'm talking about a new synthesis—a more thoroughly materialist epistemology. Lenin wrote Materialism and Empirico-Criticism where he argued against these things [like "political truth," or "truth as an organizing principle"] but sometimes the practical Lenin got in the way of the philosophical Lenin. The political exigencies that were imposed contributed to a situation where some of the way Lenin dealt with contradictions had an aspect of Stalin. There are many examples of this in The Furies, [a book on the French and Russian revolutions by Arno Mayer]11. In some instances, the Bolsheviks had a kind of "Mafia" approach in some areas, especially during the civil war that followed the October 1917 Revolution. In some cases, when people would be organized by reactionaries to fight against the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks would retaliate broadly and without mercy. Or they would kill people not only for deserting the Red Army but even for dragging their feet in fighting the civil war. While sometimes in the midst of war, extreme measures may be necessary, overall this is not the way to deal with these contradictions. I addressed some of this in "Two Great Humps"—I read Lenin on this and thought, "this is not right." There's epistemological stuff bound up with all this as well.
We Communists Stand for Truth
BA Continues: I'm trying to set a framework for the whole approach to our project. Who's right: me, or people who say, you can't avoid doing things the way that people have done it up to now? Some even say: "I wish you could, but I don't think you can." Is what I'm arguing for really a materialist way of approaching our project? Is this really what we have to go through now to get where we need to go? Is this, analogically, Einstein to Newton, or is it a bunch of nonsense—since Newtonian physics can describe the reality around us and has empirical evidence on its side? Is there in fact no other way to do what I'm arguing for, no other way to get to communism? Or is the other road really the reality of it?
Is what I'm arguing for just, at best, some interesting and intriguing ideas and provocative thinking—or is it really the way we have to approach things, as I've said? Even more fundamentally, having to do with my point on communists having the most trouble admitting their mistakes—which has to do with no one else is trying to remake the world—but is it even important for us to try to get to the truth of things?12 Or are we politicians who are trying to achieve certain political objectives, and all that other stuff about getting to the truth is a bunch of petty bourgeois nonsense, since we're about "getting to power"? It's a fundamental question of two roads here. One of the big questions is "are we really people who are trying to get to the truth, or is it really just a matter of 'truth is an organizing principle?'" Lenin criticized this philosophically—"truth as an organizing principle"—and you can criticize it to reject religion and opportunism which you don't find particularly useful, but you can end up doing this yourself in another form. Mao said we communists stand for truth—we should be scientific and honest. Is this a concern of ours? Or is our concern to just know enough truth to accomplish our objectives as we perceive them at a given time? Just enough truth to accomplish our objectives—even if we apply this not on the most narrow level and instead our approach is that the truth we need is what we need to get to the "four alls." [The "four alls" refers to the achievement of the necessary conditions for communism. It refers to a statement by Marx that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the necessary transition to the abolition of all class distinctions, of all the production relations on which these class distinctions rest, of all the social relations that correspond to these production relations, and to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that correspond to these relations. For a fuller discussion of this see the talk by Bob Avakian, "Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism."]
1 Bob Avakian, "Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Must and Will" (Revolution, No. 50, December 1981).
2 "Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party," 16 May 1966 in Important Documents on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970).
3 Avakian, A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror? (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1984).
4 "Some Questions to Carl Sagan and Stephen Gould" and "More Questions to Carl Sagan, Stephen Gould, and Isaac Asimov" in Avakian, Reflections, Sketches and Provocations: Essays and Commentary, 1981-1987 (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1990).
5 Excerpts from "Strategic Questions," a tape-recorded talk by Bob Avakian, appeared in Revolutionary Worker (RW) Nos. 881, 884-893, 10 Nov 1996 and 01 Dec 1996 through 09 Feb 1997. These are available at www.rwor.org under Bob Avakian, Uniting All Who Can Be United: On the Revolutionary Strategy of the United Front Under the Leadership of the Proletariat. Additional excerpts from "Strategic Questions" — "On Propaganda and Agitation: Being Eminently Reasonable — And Completely Outrageous — Speaking and Writing With Masses of People in Mind," appeared in RW #1176, 24 Nov 2002 and is also available at www.rwor.org under Bob Avakian, Further Thoughts and Writings.
6 Bill Martin is a social theorist and professor of philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago. His numerous books include: Politics in the Impasse (1996), The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations (2001), and Avant Rock (2002). The book Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics by Bob Avakian and Bill Martin is forthcoming in 2005 from Open Court publishers in the US.
7 Audio files of this talk are available on the web at bobavakian.net.
8 This refers to the talk "Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism," referred to earlier.
9 Lee Feigon, Mao, a Reinterpretation (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2002).
10 See "The Struggle in the Realm of Ideas," from "Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism," Revolutionary Worker No. 1250 (22 Aug 2004). Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who brought forward ideas that seemed pragmatically to promise an increase in agricultural production, and so were seized on by Stalin. Lysenko's theories were wrong, and the affair had serious negative consequences not only to the Soviet economy but also within the ICM. Available on the web at www.rwor.org.
11 Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
12 "Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism, Part 8; Moving Towards Communism," RW #1260 (28 November 2004).
"It is man's social being that determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world." —Mao Tse-tung; Where Do Correct Ideas Come From; (May 1963)