Revolution #219, December 12, 2010
Editors' Note: The following is an excerpt from a recent talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA; this is one of a number of excerpts from that talk that are being published in Revolution. The first of these excerpts appeared in Revolution #218, November 28, 2010. The entire Part I of the talk is available at revcom.us. This has been edited, and footnotes have been added, for publication.
The "Divine Right of Kings" and "Democracy"—Two "Cohering Mythologies" of Two Different Systems of Exploitation
In feudal society, it was "natural" that everyone had their particular place. I've spoken to this before: Thomas Aquinas—who was a theologian, but also a theoretician in a broader sense, whose ideas corresponded in basic terms to the relations of feudal society—put forward the idea that everything in the universe, even rocks, had their place, all ordained by God. And then there is "the divine right of kings," a cornerstone of feudal society. This was considered such an outrage by bourgeois revolutionaries and bourgeois theoreticians. Recently, I was reading Thomas Paine again, and he goes on and on about what an absurd and criminal idea the divine right of kings and hereditary role of kings is. All this guarantees, he insisted, is that you could get a moron having absolute power in society just as well as a wise person. You could get someone mentally defective being declared to have divine right to rule. And on and on.
Well, yes, this condemnation of the "divine right of kings" is understandable, from the point of view of the rising bourgeoisie, which needed to break through the constraints of feudalism ultimately in the economic base. But let's not be reductionist—they did battle it out in the realm of the superstructure, and the theoreticians of the rising bourgeois class and the bourgeois revolution believed what they were arguing for, at least overwhelmingly. To them that really was an absurd and criminal idea—the divine right of kings and the absolute order of things as established in such a way that to try to change it would be to go against the very fabric of reality and of the universe as ordained by God and maintained by God's will. As much as those bourgeois theoreticians saw this as absurd and outrageous, in the feudal order it was just the opposite: to rebel against the king, the monarch, was to rebel against God and the God-ordained order. And everyone, from the nobles to the serfs, was supposed to know their role and play their role accordingly and appropriately.
Now, if we move a little bit further away from the bourgeois era and look back on it from the historical perspective of where things need to go and can go—not are bound to go, but need to go and can go—we can see that the great talisman of bourgeois democracy, elections and the right of the governed to choose those who govern them, in fact, in the reality of the functioning of bourgeois society, has no more absolute legitimacy than the divine right of kings. It is just another form in which the needs and interests of the ruling class are asserted in this particular kind of society, and a mechanism through which—and through the control over that process of bourgeois politics and elections—the interests of the ruling class are maintained and enforced. It is their version—DEMOCRACY, ELECTIONS is, in effect, their version—of the divine right of kings. It is a cohering mythology of a certain system. It's not mythology that they have elections, it's mythology what those elections are purported to be all about and what happens through them. In reality, they are not an expression of "the will" or "the sovereignty" of "the people," but an expression of the process through which the capitalist class maintains its system of exploitation and its domination, its dictatorship, over the classes and groups in society that it exploits and oppresses.
And the "human nature" that goes along with this society is no different—the "human nature" that people constantly assert as why things are and have to be the way they are, is nothing other than a reflection of the underlying relations and dynamics of a certain system, the system of capitalism.
This is a point of such importance that we do need to keep stressing it, particularly in this period in which there is so much confusion created around this, much of it the result of the distorting and obfuscating viewpoint of the ruling class, which has such widespread influence today, which seeps down among all sections of the people, so to speak, and is aggressively promoted at every turn by political and ideological representatives, operatives and apologists of the ruling class, and those who follow in their wake, while—and this is a very important point—it is also reinforced by the underlying dynamics of the system itself. This view of human nature is reinforced constantly by the underlying dynamics of the system itself—so that we need to continue to return to this, and dig into it deeply with people, bringing to light and to life Marx's great insight that all of human history involves the continuous transformation of human nature; that human nature, if (or to the degree) it has any valid meaning, is a part of the superstructure. It is an ensemble, if you will, of values and viewpoints, culture and morality, which correspond ultimately to a certain underlying system—underlying social and fundamentally economic/production relations. It is not some transcendental thing that has been with us "since Adam and Eve"—or, more scientifically, since human beings first evolved—and has remained unchanged and that will always remain unchanged and unchangeable.
The Real Bases for Change—and the Real Alternatives
So this is how things actually are in regard to the present circumstances of human society and the possibilities for how society can proceed and be organized: It is a matter of either bringing about a radical alternative to the presently dominant capitalist-imperialist system—an alternative which is viable, and sustainable, because it proceeds on the basis of the productive forces at hand and further unfetters them, through the transformation of the social relations, and most fundamentally the production relations and, in dialectical relation with that, the transformation of the superstructure of politics and ideology—creating, through this transformation, and fundamentally the transformation of the underlying material conditions, a radically new economic system, as the foundation of a radically new society as a whole; either that, or, what will in fact assert itself as the only real alternative in today's world—being drawn, or forced, into a society proceeding on the terms, and locked within the confines, of commodity production and exchange, and more specifically the production relations and accumulation process and dynamics of capitalism, and its corresponding social relations and relations of political power, as well as its prevailing culture, ideology and morality. It's either one or the other. Those are the two choices.
Who are we to say so? We are interpreters of reality; we're scientific investigators and synthesizers of reality, that's who we are. It's reality that says this, and we are those who, at this time, have come to understand this—not through some mystical or religious process but through applying a science that's been developed and is continually being developed.
So it's either the one or the other—and all other schemes will lead to one or the other. If they are not consciously striving for the first, they will lead to the second: if they are not consciously striving for a whole, radically new and different world, they will lead back to, or be co-opted within, or crushed by, the existing old world. You try to carve out little enclaves or ways in which you operate independently of the system—you're either eaten alive and spit out by the system, or you are an insignificant countercurrent, for a while, to the actual dynamics and prevailing relations of the system, a countercurrent which will sooner or later, in fact, be eaten alive—if not literally crushed politically, just overwhelmed—by the dynamics of this system.
This is a system that operates, just like every system, according to certain dynamics and through certain relations. And as long as you haven't radically ruptured with that system and brought about something in its place which can actually replace it and be viable and sustainable, you will be forced back into that system: that system of private ownership of the means of production, of capital, that system of commodity production and exchange, that system driven by anarchy of production and the resulting conflict among capitalists, a system in which capital takes form as many and competing capitals, not one gigantic block of capital, which itself would be out of line with the dynamics of commodity production and exchange and the anarchy of production, and would be broken up by those dynamics, repeatedly. Just look at the history of this country, including in more recent times: even gigantic amalgamations of capital go under or are broken up and re-formed in different associations of capital. This is all as a result of the underlying dynamics of this system. If you do not rupture with that, through a revolution in the superstructure, and the radical transformation of the economic base to something which can actually be viable and sustainable and function in place of those dynamics, you will get those dynamics back—because people have to eat and people have to have other necessities of life, and that will happen through one form or another in accordance with the productive forces at hand, generally speaking. So, if you don't consciously bring about the one, you will get the other. In one form or another and through one avenue or another, you'll get the same fundamental dynamics of capitalism, if you don't consciously rupture with that and actually make revolution to uproot and abolish the whole capitalist system, replacing it with socialism and advancing on the road to a communist world.
A Crucial Breakthrough, A Deeper Grounding in Materialism: Understanding the "Driving Force of Anarchy" as the Decisive Dynamic of Capitalism
Here I think it is important to mention—because this is also little understood, even in our own ranks, perhaps—what a crucial breakthrough it was, and what a crucial foundation for a radical break with economism,1 when back around 1980 our Party, through doing work to dig more fully and deeply into the dynamics of capitalism and how the contradictions in the world asserted themselves and interacted, identified "the driving force of anarchy" as the principal dynamic of capitalism, as opposed to the principal form of the contradictions of capitalism being the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Of course, we were roundly, and in some cases viciously, attacked for this. It was asserted that we were leaving the people and the class struggle out of the equation, that this analysis was just filtered through the prism of our prejudice of living in an imperialist society, and so on and so forth. But this was such a crucial breakthrough—to understand, to really get a deeper materialist understanding of what it is we're doing and on what "stage" or what foundation we're actually doing what we're doing, in setting out to make revolution.
This has everything to do with whether you proceed from objective reality and recognize the basis, within the contradictory dynamics of that reality, for radical change—or whether you're just proceeding from a set of ideas, including an idealized vision of the masses, which you are trying to impose on reality, with both the masses and objective reality more broadly being seen as essentially "blank slates." That is a view that is in opposition to understanding the principal role of the driving force of anarchy in the system that we're up against, which does set the primary stage and foundation for what we have to do to transform society and the world.
Now, we may not like all this, but that's where we are. We may not like the fact that capitalism and its dynamics are still dominant in the world, overwhelmingly so at this time, and set the stage for the struggle we have to wage—we may not like this, but that's the reality. And in that reality is the basis for radically changing things. It's in confronting and struggling to change that reality, and not through some other means. It's through understanding and then acting to transform that reality along pathways that the contradictory character of that reality does open up—pathways which must be seized on and acted on to carry out that transformation of reality.
So this was a fundamentally important breakthrough when we firmly identified "the driving force of anarchy" as the principal dynamic of capitalism. And this has to do with everything I've been talking about: why you can't reform this system, in fact, and why you can't just arbitrarily try to replace it with any old utopian scheme of whatever kind, that you might like to impose on reality, proclaimed under whatever banner.
Along with all these dynamics of capitalism, which I've been speaking to, there are other aspects of the relations of production besides the ownership system, which capitalism embodies within its overall functioning, and there are other social relations that are embodied within the capitalist system. For example, what we call the mental/manual contradiction, the contradiction between people who carry out physical labor and those who carry out intellectual labor; patriarchy and the oppression of women; the oppression of various nations and peoples (national oppression); regional differences and disparities which can become antagonisms and often do; and other significant contradictions within a particular country or part of the world and between different countries, or different parts of the world, and different alliances of countries. These are all fundamentally encompassed within, and expressions of, the underlying dynamics of capitalism at this stage in the development of human society—not some predetermined development that was bound to happen, but how human historical evolution has actually taken place, and where it has actually brought us to.
1. Historically in the communist movement, "economism" refers to a trend that has insisted that the way to build a movement for socialism is to focus on the more narrow sphere of the relations between workers and their capitalist employers and the more immediate and limited struggles to which this gives rise—an approach which in fact limits the struggle to one for reforms within the existing system, rather than revolution to abolish this system, as the first step, or leap, in radically transforming society, and ultimately the world as a whole, to abolish all relations of exploitation and oppression. (More generally, "economism" can refer to an orientation that at least objectively amounts to striving for reforms within this system, divorced from—and ultimately in opposition to—building a movement for revolution. This is captured in Lenin's pungent phrase, characterizing this trend: "The movement is everything, the final aim nothing.") Not understanding, fully and fully correctly, the actual dynamics of the capitalist system can reinforce economist and reformist tendencies to see the problem as just one of the "greed" of the capitalists, or of too much influence and power on the part of corporations, etc., rather than understanding the fundamental reasons why this system cannot be reformed, and must be abolished through revolution, and why a radically new system, socialism and ultimately communism, can open the way to completely new and unprecedented dimensions of emancipation for humanity as a whole. [back]