San Francisco Chronicle
June 10 2005
Memoir traces path to communism
Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Bob Avakian has devoted his life to the one ideology that he believes
holds the promise of massively releasing human freedom and dignity.
The ideology is communism.
Berkeley-bred Avakian’s new memoir, “From Ike to Mao and Beyond”
($18.95; Insight Press), leaves a breathtaking impression. Having
deepened and purified his convictions over 40 years of personal and
political struggle, Avakian sounds a high, sustained cry for complete
social transformation almost as if he were the trumpet of Lenin
himself.
It’s as if democratic capitalism’s triumph in the 20th century was
history’s biggest mistake, a tragic wrong turn from the revolutionary
road marked out by Lenin in the Russia of 1917 after the writings of
Marx and by Mao in the China of the 1950s and ’60s.
Avakian, 62, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and other
upheavals of the Bay Area in the 1960s, makes an unqualified case for
Marxism-Leninism as a fertile thought system that’s as alive now as
it was when the two revolutionary masterminds created it to answer
what they saw as capitalism’s fundamental inhumanity.
Although Avakian is a devotee of Marx and Lenin, he’s also respected
in revolutionary circles for his ground-breaking criticism of
communist methods.
“Marxism is not a scripture, it’s not a religious dogma,” Avakian
writes. “It’s a scientific approach to reality.”
New York’s Insight Press premiered Avakian’s paperback in Berkeley
last month. A diverse host committee made up of people who welcome
Avakian as an alternative voice presented the work and will present
it again in San Francisco tonight. Although the author has elected
not to appear, give press interviews or even disclose where he lives,
his representatives say he wants the book to contribute to a renewed
dialogue about Marxism and political theory in general.
“I think that Bob Avakian has taken the whole idea and conception of
communism to another level — he’s revived the communist project, if
you will, going beyond Marx, Lenin and Mao in some really important
ways,” said Lenny Wolff, who wrote the memoir’s introduction.
Avakian’s representatives said the author is eager to have his views
more widely discussed but wants to stay out of sight because he fears
government harassment. He fled America in 1981 amid what he describes
in the book as a suffocating climate of intolerance.
The first half of the book traces Avakian’s four-square upbringing
and swift political development from pre-adolescence. The second half
shows him reclaiming Leninism as he turns aside the conservatism of
the old-line Communist Party, the pragmatism of trade unionism, the
revolutionary exhaustion of the Black Panthers after their prime and
the anti-leadership tendencies of the New Left.
Following what he is convinced is the correct line, he joins with two
fellow Bay Area radicals to form the Revolutionary Union in the late
’60s. He expands the organization nationally in 1970 in a bid to
create a vanguard for a renewed communist movement.
But America in the ’70s goes right instead of left and, in 1980,
Ronald Reagan is elected president. Under surveillance for his
political activities and grieving a fellow revolutionary’s slaying in
Chicago, Avakian goes into exile in France and assumes the
chairmanship of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a Maoist group
intent on radical social transformation in “the colossus of late
imperial America.”
Today, Avakian remains party chairman and is perhaps best known as a
prolific, uncompromising contributor to the Revolutionary Worker
newspaper. The grandchild of Armenian immigrants who settled in
Fresno to farm, Avakian enjoyed a warm and familial childhood. His
mother taught him compassion and sacrifice. The late Alameda County
Superior Court judge Spurgeon Avakian, who was changed by his
experiences of discrimination as a person of Armenian descent, showed
his son about fighting injustice.
Young Avakian’s religious beliefs and patriotism were deeply felt. He
tells of saying the Pledge of Allegiance as a 9- or 10-year-old and
wanting to fall to his knees in gratitude for “not living in one of
those awful countries that so many people seem to have had the
misfortune of being born in.” Sticking with Eisenhower even though
his parents went over to Adlai Stevenson, he was absorbed in TV
coverage of the 1952 Republican presidential convention.
But devotion to mainstream values gave way to skepticism. A milestone
on the way to Avakian’s transformation to radicalism was discovering
that President Kennedy lied when he used the U.N. Charter to justify
a naval blockade in response to the presence of Soviet missiles in
Cuba in 1962. At first drawn to the Panthers and other radical groups
at the time, Avakian turned to communism under the tutelage of a
disaffected old-line Communist Party member. He took the revolution
to Richmond, organizing workers and poor people — the proletariat —
against the bourgeoisie. He read to them from a popular book about
village life in China before Mao’s revolution.
He went to China in 1971 and was awed by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
“We saw truly wondrous things,” he writes. He came home convinced
that revolutionary change could take place in American society as a
scientific process.
In the book, Avakian is at his most provocative when he assesses
Stalin and Mao. He applauds Stalin for leading the first historical
experience in building socialism, the Soviet Union, under difficult
circumstances. Although he refers to Stalin’s mistakes, he makes no
mention of the millions who died under the Soviet dictatorship and
insists upon a balanced view.
“If the bourgeoisie and its political representatives can uphold
people like Madison and Jefferson,” he writes, “then the proletariat
and its vanguard forces can and should uphold Stalin, in an overall
sense and with historical perspective.”
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Book reading
Authors, actors and community leaders will read from Bob Avakian’s
memoir, “From Ike to Mao and Beyond,” on these dates in San
Francisco:
7 p.m. today at Valencia Street Books, 569 Valencia, (415) 552-7200.
7 p.m. June 20 at the Canvas Cafe, 1200 9th Ave. (at Lincoln), (415)
504- 0060.
The book is available at independent bookstores and through the
publisher, Insight Press,