Digging Deep for the Truth, Not Meandering and Grazing on the Surface

Forging a team of scientists and building a movement for revolution with BA as the solid core.

September 9, 2019 | revcom.us

From a member of the National Revolution Tour

We’ve accomplished some important things with the work of the Tour on this leg. The most notable being that we are beginning to really forge a team of scientists. We are beginning to demystify what it means to lead the kind of process where our unevenness can work in our favor, where people of varying understandings can carve into a question and enrich the process of transforming reality. This is still very initial and our ability to do this came out of great struggle, in particular as it relates to questions of the Cultural Revolution in the Revolutionary Communist Party and how these questions, of whether we are working to make an ACTUAL REVOLUTION or working for something else, get concentrated in BA.

We had struggle from the beginning about epistemological discipline. Meaning that we have to be a team of scientists working on the SAME problem and have discipline about doing so, and if we are trying to work to transform reality, we sure as hell can’t act like we’re doing it from scratch. We are doing science, which means we’re building on the collectively accumulated knowledge. 

If a team of scientists comes together to… cure cancer for example, the first thing they’d do is study what’s been understood so far, learn the method, experiment further and forge new pathways as they learn.

So, no! We can’t just watch BA and let our brain go shooting off all over the place; we need to speak to what he’s saying there, understand it, build on it and apply the method to reality. If we’re to change the world, up against every other framework (including those we’ve taken up as part of a revisionist pathway), we better steep ourselves in the work that the leading scientist has done. He gives a lot of guidance proceeding from the underlying workings of reality and from beyond the blinders of the permanent necessity of the world as it is. He’s waging polemic and ideological struggle, handing people the tools to carve in on different questions.

Going there with people is key in unleashing the kind of elasticity that needs to be unleashed if we are to build a movement for revolution. We have to broaden our conception of what it means to organize people on the spot – it’s not just give them a stack of palm cards… it means presenting them with the solid core of what we do have and working with them on the problems of the revolution. This is what can be done if we are putting BA straight up without getting in the way.

Too often we show people BA and we go chase things the masses bring up, or other times we get in the way by trying to “lead them back to it” by “breaking it down in our own way” and this often leads away from where BA is trying to take things. We’ve seen in the Q&A on the gangs and in what was unleashed on this leg of the tour when we insisted on epistemological discipline amongst ourselves, that the elasticity and initiative unleashed among people is qualitatively different when they are actually studying and proceeding from what BA is putting forward.

 Again, it’s the point that you aren’t starting from scratch. We have this leader and the way advanced work he’s done, so we MUST introduce people to this work and give them the solid core to work with and take off from – to unleash their creativity on THAT basis. This is science – we are trying to advance an understanding collectively with others – to learn as much as we can from people and unleash them to go to work on the same problem with the same crucial tools as opposed to everyone putting out a mish-mash of ideas and political frameworks. So when we take out BA we better be going out to get people to engage, and we should not underestimate just how much people can get out of it when this happens. It’s not that they’ll understand everything all at once, but if we don’t have confidence that they can understand things in some basic way we will treat them as tools, never advance the scientific understanding and never really unleash the kind of ferment and initiative in society that characterizes a mass movement for revolution.

With that I want to come back to the point about the Cultural Revolution in the RCP. All the things that keep us from introducing people to BA or that compel us to get in the way (in the various ways I described) even when we do introduce people to BA have everything to do with whether or not we are working to make a real revolution. All the defensiveness, the pulls toward appealing to where people are at, etc., they’re pulls that are out there in society. They are the same pulls and frameworks that are keeping people away from revolution, the frameworks we have to break with and fight for others to break with.

This is why it’s important to wage this line struggle explicitly, and to do it in a way where we are enabled and enabling others to differentiate between the two roads. Rather than ignore these pulls or do a B-line to pretend they don’t exist, or table them because we have immediate things to do… we have to use this struggle as a marker to measure the advance of the quality of our work and as a tool to deepen people’s understanding, doing this at the same time as we work on transforming reality and not as a marginal and separate process.