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Here's the quick & dirty on Chairman Bob. At the end of the 60s he was reading Mao and hanging out with the Black Panther Party, working with the Peace & Freedom Party, Ramparts mag - the Bay Area scene. Joined with an ex-CP, ex-PL full-fledged Maoist, Leibel Bergman, who was looking for a China-friendly alternative to the increasingly sectarian PL. They formed a local collective, Revolutionary Union, which picked up support from like-minded SDS and ex-PL types. Ran for nat sec of SDS at the convention of the split, June 1969 - promoted by the RYM II faction as a pro-worker counter to the Weatherman faction. As RU grew nationally, Avakian distinguished himself as the last man standing in a series of faction fights, both inside the RU and in the broader Maoist trend. In short order, his RU became RCP, they declared themselves the vanguard party, he went to China and met Mao and Shanghai Cultural revolution sparkplug Zhang Chunqiao, and he broke with China and his mentor Bergman to support the Gang of Four after Mao's death and the rise of Deng. Then he blew the country when he faced prison time for disrupting Deng's visit to the U.S. [This is all in From Ike to Mao. Zhang, one of the Four, had curried PL in a similar way in the 60s, according to Roderick MacFarquhar's Mao's Last Revolution.] Avakian's factional winning streak is his main similarity to Mao - up to now, when the meaning and purpose of Maoism as a political trend is up for grabs [Sendero, Naxalites and Prachanda-istas notwithstanding]. In fact, he has broken from both Sendero and the Nepalese Maoists. Only one remaining feature of Mao's Cultural Revolution - the RCP's ideological touchstone - is comprehensible in the RCP setting today: the personality cult. Like the pre-Deng CCP, the RCP can point to the trail of opponents defeated by Mao as proof that he is a genius and keeper of the flame. The problem is, the harder they promote this, the more grotesque they appear. There is a revealing portrait of Avakian in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's memoir, Outlaw Woman. ethan young ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
