When I tell people that I’m a Maoist, the RCP always comes up. Naturally, since they were the closest thing that we’ve had to a Maoist party in the US. In the 1970s, they did good shit. Sending cadre to organize coal mines and factories and taking a firm stand against both the revisionist Deng Xiaopeng-Hua Guofeng clique (the struggle after Mao’s death ended up with the party going through a nasty split with a faction led by Mickey Jarvis and others breaking off to form the Revolutionary Workers’ Headquarters which eventually folded into FRSO) and the imperialist USSR. Throwing paint on revisionists is good practice. This good shit got them the attention of the FBI which considered them a major threat to the good order and stability of the country. Heavy Radicals is a good source if you’re interested in this history, it’s a damn good and interesting one, along with a thorough account of the lengths that the State will go through to destroy revolutionary organizations. Of course, the RCP of the 1970s was fraught with problems, losing a substantial amount of early black and brown cadre after bungling the Boston busing crisis and forming a fundamental united front with a racist slumlord named Louise Day Hicks and displaying other marked white chauvinist tendencies that never really went away. This being said, the RCP was probably the most serious thing going on the American Communist left in the 1970s and 1980s, organizing large numbers of black and brown street youth and consistently upholding the need for armed struggle in an atmosphere where other formations that came out of the ’60s had long degenerated and either collapsed, embraced various strands of revisionism and opportunism, or became jaded and entered the Democratic Party. The theoretical foundation and defense of what would become Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, like it or not, owes much to Avakian.

That was then. This is now. The modern day RCP is a shell of what it once was. The RCP always embraced a sort of weird personality cult around Avakian, now it’s on massive doses of steroids. Every piece of their propaganda includes the man’s face. Their paper has movie reviews which, instead of discussing films, discuss Avakian’s take on the films. Essentially, this is a cult. Don’t join it. They have no mass base because they don’t apply the mass line. They show up to other people’s protests and demonstrations, ignore mass leadership, and try to hijack them. They do ridiculous media stunts such as the “November 4th” nonsense that the reactionaries are crowing about. To be clear, there is not going to be any “uprising” on November 4th, because if the RCP was true to its theoretical heritage instead of the Avakianite trash that it upholds as “newest stage”, it would know that there can be not even the slightest inching towards a revolution without base areas, mass bases, and a correctly guided party. The RCP’s deviance is shown in the “Refuse Fascism” fracas, which apparently has decided that right opportunism, getting thousands of people doxxed through public petitions, and tailing the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in organizing a defense of a fired FBI director is somehow an appropriate stand-in for the mass-line method of leadership. When they show up in black neighborhoods with this bullshit, they get run off, rightfully so. Avakian went to Harlem after Ferguson to do a talk with Cornel West and he was almost booed off the stage. The black people didn’t come to hear him, they came to hear West. The RCP cadres and organizers that I’ve run across in Saint Louis show a marked lack of knowledge of basic Maoist principles, don’t know what the mass line is, and apparently are unfamiliar with even rudimentary texts or events in our history. They do, however, know a lot about Avakian, or a lot of what Avakian wants them to know. They are also extremely condescending with the masses, blowing them off, ignoring them, and trying to push papers and Avakian’s ideas, which, again, shows how far from Maoism they’ve turned. These aren’t Maoists.

Black people aren’t going to follow white people, especially Bob Avakian. Telling them that all they have to do to have a revolution is follow some old white dude who lived in self-imposed exile for decades is the pinnacle of tone-deafness and stupidity. We have our own leaders, our own experiences, and our own revolutionary tradition. Avakian played a good role in the ’70s and ’80s, as did the RCP. But now, he’s a sad sack and an inflated ego that should be swept into history’s Sharps container. He’s taking up space and has no further use. Nobody’s afraid of the RCP. Quit giving them space and credit and letting them puff themselves up. Let them die with their geriatric god-emperor.