The July issue of Revolution, ’Organ of the Central Committee of the RCP USA’ (Vol 1 #10 p.11) features a picture which, as the old Chinese adage has it, is ’worth a thousand words’. Pictured is the RCP’s Chairman, Bob Avakian, who, photographed from an angle which professionals use to make small things look bigger, is shown sporting a ’Leninist’ goatee, a ’Leninist’ cap, a ’Leninist’ tunic, and gesturing with a ’Leninist’ downward thrust of the forefinger. This one picture captures the absurdity, megalomania and pretentiousness of our opportunists with such precision that, while it may not be worth quite a thousand words, it is at least deserving of a few hundred.
In the July 4th speech during which the photograph was taken, Chairman Avakian demonstrates why it is he is striving so hard to be a Lenin look-alike. Where Lenin consistently opposed all opportunist attempts to smuggle in the petty bourgeoisie under the heading of “we workers” or to merge the ’oppression’ of the p.b. with the oppression of the working class, Chairman Avakian lumps all and sundry under the heading of “...we got to slave and suffer...”. Chairman Avakian ’slaves and suffers’? Where Lenin taught that the struggle for the workers’ immediate demands must be fused with the struggle for political power, Chairman Avakian has chosen a ’looser’ formulation, to whit: “And we’re not going for any of their trickles because they shut it off a long time ago. And we ain’t satisfied with trickles anyway.” Chairman Avakian is not going for ’trickles’? Jobs or Income Now? It is a small matter to our Chairman that the only class whose ’trickles’ were ’shut off ’a long time ago’ is the petty bourgeoisie, or that in being “ain’t satisfied with trickles” our Chairman is simply expressing the frustration of the p.b. he emerged from. No. Our Chairman is no ’dogmatist’; he has no intention of copying Lenin ’word for word’. Where Lenin patiently and scientifically explained the concept of Communism, our Chairman has little more to say about it than “What the hell is scary about that?”, “why in the hell can’t we run all of society”, “Why the hell can’t we reshape society...?” Thus speaks the Chairman of the ’party of the proletariat’, the champion of ’science’, the ’upholder’ of Marxism-Leninism. Where Lenin sharply condemned such vulgarization and caricaturing of Marxism, Chairman Avakian, on the plea of the “lively language of the masses” wallows in it. Thus it should be clear why Avakian mimics Lenin. Were it not for the goatee and cap, there would be no resemblance at all.