Revolution #240, July 24, 2011


BIRDS CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO CROCODILES, BUT HUMANITY CAN SOAR BEYOND THE HORIZON

Part 2: BUILDING THE MOVEMENT FOR REVOLUTION

Editors’ Note: The following is the ninth excerpt from Part 2 of a recent talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which is being serialized in this paper. Previous excerpts appeared in Revolution #232 to #239. This has been edited, and footnotes have been added, for publication. The entire talk is available at revcom.us.

Hastening While Awaiting a Revolutionary Situation

Having emphasized the point that the development of the United Front under the Leadership of the Proletariat will be a complex and dynamic process of mutual influences and positive synergy—while overall and ultimately the bedrock role of basic masses, and the leadership role of the Party, will be decisive within this complex process—the fundamental question is posed: where is that leading? We're not just building a "movement." We are building a movement for something very specific—revolution. In fact, we have consciously formulated things not as "building a revolutionary movement," but "building a movement for revolution." This is perhaps somewhat subtle—it is a nuance of difference that is involved—but it is an important difference. The first formulation ("building a revolutionary movement") can more easily lend itself to being turned into something else—into its opposite—into a situation in which the movement becomes everything and the final aim nothing. The movement is very important, but only insofar as it contributes to getting to the fundamental aim—revolution, and ultimately a communist world. Otherwise, what is the point, and how is it any different than a thousand other strands of things that flare up and die down, or take various utopian and ultimately reformist avenues?

Everything we're doing is aimed at being in a position to make revolution when the conditions come into being for that: hastening while awaiting the development of a revolutionary situation, and the emergence of a revolutionary people—grounded in the "mixing" of international factors and developments with factors and developments within the particular country, coming together at a certain point to give rise, perhaps in ways that were largely unforeseen shortly before that, to a revolutionary crisis, a deep-going crisis in society as a whole. We can look at the current situation today, with its "multiple crises"—not yet the "Crisis" (with a capital C) that is needed for a revolution, but very real, multiple and interacting crises, with very real and very severe difficulties for the imperialist ruling class. You can just go down the list from the sphere of the economy, to the situation with these wars that they're waging—to a large degree, they've tried to get everybody in the U.S. not to think about Iraq any more and pretend everything's fine there, which is far from the case, and meanwhile they're having all kinds of trouble in Afghanistan.

This firing of commanders and shuffling of the command for Afghanistan is not just a matter of insubordination, though it immediately took that form and that was real. But it has to do—and they've even acknowledged that it has to do—with deeper problems they're having strategically. Think about whether they can really just turn their back and walk away, or find some kind of solution that's not really a solution for them, in these situations like Afghanistan. The more farsighted and hard core of their theorists and strategists are recognizing that they cannot do that—and this is a very serious contradiction for them. We shouldn't overstate that, or think it's at a place right now where it's not, but neither should we underestimate the significance of it and the potential of all this to develop into a much more profound and even more acute crisis, in combination with other factors in the world, as things develop.

This relates to the question of a "legitimacy" crisis and its relation, in turn, to a revolutionary crisis. Hastening while awaiting means precisely that. It doesn't mean that we sit around waiting till one fine day—somehow automatically or magically, and without our active involvement—the legitimacy of the whole system and the ruling class gets called into question in an acute way for millions and millions of people, and the other elements of a revolutionary situation suddenly emerge. With that kind of passive orientation, there will never be a revolution, and there probably will not even be the emergence of an objective revolutionary situation. You cannot separate the objective factor from the work of the subjective factor, the conscious revolutionary forces, in that kind of way. Things which might have led to a revolutionary situation will not lead to that in the absence of conscious revolutionary forces working continually to influence the development of things toward a revolutionary situation.

We're back to a formulation we took from Lenin, "no one can say" (Lenin was speaking about the question of how the more privileged, bourgeoisified sections of the working class would fall out in the event of a revolutionary crisis and struggle, and he emphasized that no one can predict that precisely); we have applied this to the development of a revolutionary situation: "no one can say" exactly what "mix" of factors will come together and lead to the eruption of a revolutionary crisis. But what we do know is that even things that may not appear to lead—or may not in and of themselves lead—to such a crisis can, in conjunction and interaction with other things (some of which may be largely or even entirely unforeseen before they occur), become part of the "mix" that leads to the eruption of a revolutionary crisis. If you're not hastening while awaiting that development, there is almost no possibility—there is very little likelihood—that it will occur. And certainly there would be very little prospect that such a revolutionary potential would even be recognized, when it did emerge, let alone be acted upon. So, on one hand, "no one can say" exactly what "mix" will come together to constitute or to bring about the eruption of a revolutionary crisis—but, as the other side of the contradiction, there is the importance of being constantly "tense" to the possibility of profound, qualitative changes in the objective situation and qualitative advances and leaps in building the movement for revolution.

"Revolutionary tenseness"

There is the question of what would constitute the "looming outline" of a revolutionary situation, and how one would be attuned and "tense" in order to recognize such a "looming outline" when it did appear on the horizon. Or, to put this another way:

What is involved is "awaiting with revolutionary tenseness," while hastening to the maximum degree possible at every point—constantly probing in the realm of analysis and theory to see what might be beneath the surface that could be part of the "mix" of a revolutionary situation emerging, while working consciously with the necessary revolutionary tenseness to hasten things toward that—to influence the political terrain, to do what is possible at a given time to shape that terrain, and to reshape it, rather than passively waiting on and reacting to objective developments.

To be continued

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