The Bob Avakian video game

[Big Red]

Look what I found!

The Chairman Bob Video Game

[notimpressed]

So stupid, so ignorant...

[Big Red]

I've seen discussion break out on 5 message boards and 3 emails lists about it... everyone who's ever run into the RCP seems to enjoy it.

[notimpressed]

I didn't. What message boards? The anarcho-punk-liberatarian-leaderless-affinity-boards?

[Burningman]

Reactionary crap, and sadly typical of the level of both understanding in debate in some leftish circles.

But... it does bring up the point of different forms of propaganda. Video game programming has gotten much easier in recent years. Games like Doom, etc can be re-wired to have totally different "skins" and meanings.

Producing a quality video game would be a way of reaching thousands of people. Any techies out there with time to kill?

[Big Red]

Ive seen it on three "general leftist" boards, a Maoist board, and a Marxist-Leninist board. As for the lists, one was "general leftist", one communist, and one unionist.

[ToniSweep]

For someone who decries "cults" they sure spent a lot of hours obsessing over one individual.

Agree or disagree with Avakian he is seriously engaging the necessary and tough questions related to making revolution and getting to communism, while this person is just interested in playing games, quite literally.


up and running again
www.sweepofhistory.blogspot.com

[Big Red]

Sometimes it's worth putting a little time in to take part in the discredit of a hack. Though I'm possitive it didn't take that long -- probably much shorter than one of the "main man's" rambling speeches in France for instance.

Some of us are "engaging" the class struggle on a daily basis, from within it, because we're proles -- not middle class college kids w/ rich daddies who live off newspaper sales in Europe.

Cheer.

[Burningman]

Oh, the real prole has shown up. For real real.

I wish we had a hell of a lot more "middle class college kids" in the movement... especially since authentic super-proles like Big Red are already taking care of the working classes.

[Big Red]

See how you speak from outside of our class? Everything the RCP prints is that way. "The masses", etc. al.

The proletariat is the ONLY revolutionary class under capitalism.

I'm not "taking care" of anyone -- nor do I want to. I'm a part of class struggle because it was forced on me -- not by choice. I can't decide to go get a manager job somewhere after college, I'll be in this position for life.

[Burningman]

"I can't decide to go get a manager job somewhere after college, I'll be in this position for life."

You know, aside from your crude reduction of politics to class background -- which I profoundly distrust -- I think you'd be interested to read the novel Germinal by Emile Zola.

Germinal's action centers on a radical miner's strike in 19th Century France. The lead character Etienne is a militant who goes from mine to mine seeking work and has some history of struggle, but in the course of a particularly sharp mass upsurge is hoisted into a leadership position.

In perhaps my favorite moment in the novel, Etienne is walking through the woods trying to sort everything out and notices that the youth of the town are engaged in a kind of wild, beautiful orgy throughout the trees at the edge of the town. He looks on them and feels something like envy -- and in that moment he realizes that his position as a leader has in fact transformed him. He has taken on "managerial" consciousness and is separated from the individual people around him not because his actual class status has changed, he is still proletarian, but because his consciousness has.

Now, you can try to avoid this dynamic. I wish you well because there is an aspect in this as to how revolutionaries can go on to become the "new boss," but there is also a deeper truth in it that isn't merely a matter of what we wish thinks to be. It's about the responsibilties of a vanguard force towards the people, something that can't be grappled with if it isn't recognized.

In other words, the moment you develop "class consciousness," you are disntinct in many ways from what the proletariat essentially is -- a class lacking consciousness of itself in history.

Marx nailed much of this in his discussion on what the proletariat is, both in lived life and also philosophically. Lenin was perhaps the first great theorist of this issue in practice through What Is To Be Done?, and IMHO it was Mao who really dug into it by formulating the "mass line" as something distinct from a mere "mass orientation."

I'm not a fan of the word "masses," largely on aesthetic grounds -- but also because it acts like "we aren't in the mix." I am certainly part of "the masses," and don't think fora second they are just some sea I swim in. But there is a deep truth to understanding that until the masses of people have something traditionally called "class consciousness," they are just that -- inchoate, lacking agency, oppressed.

But I guess this is all a bunch of big book talk and a for real worker like yourself, not to be bothered with... nor any discussion of why proletarian revolutions in the imperialist countries haven't been forthcoming since the last effort in 1930s Spain. Maybe it's because the conception of "proletarian" as defined by particular occupations, rather than general relation to production connected to a wider social matrix (nation, gender), has for too long led to a "workerist" fetishization of trade organizing (or social movements) to the exclusion of properly political organization. Which, as a maybe necessary sidenote, might just involve the conscious participation of non-proletarians. In other words, I don't really care what Bob Avakian's dad did for a living nearly so much as the class content of the political line he leads by.

Forgive me now. I have to go back to work.

[flyby2]

I'm not going to comment on this incredibly stupid video game, other than to point out that it says a lot both about those who "made it" and those who have chosen to promote it.

Precious leadership of this kind emerged in the world, something rare, at a moment in history when the whole future hangs by a thread (and the whole communist project with it).

And someone thinks this kind of bullshit is an appropriate way to raise a critique of Avakian?


on a secondary point:
It is not true that the working class is "the only revolutionary class under capitalism."

In fact revolution will draw in significant forces from many classes. And this is true, not just under capitalism but will be true far into socialism.

The proletariat is the only THORIOUGHLY revolutionary class -- meaning it is the only class capable of LEADING the revolutionary struggle to the point it needs to go (the abolition of classes, the all-the-way transformation, the radical ruptures in property and ideas, the abolition of the four alls.)

But in the capitalist epoch, there are other, significant classes that make a major contribution to the revolutionary process -- including particularly the peasantry, which throughout much of the world is a major (or even the main) force pressing forward revolutionary struggle (under the leadership of the proletariat).

To win, the proletariat needs a united front for revolution -- under capitalism and even under the transitional period of the revolutionary dictatorship.

The workerist identity politics ("we are workers for workers, fuck everyone else, especially the middle classes) has nothing in common with communism.

[celticfire84]

I agree with flyby. It's easy to mock someone, it isn't easy to actually dig into what they have to say and struggle with that. I have met very few people who criticize the RCP have actually made attempts to find out what their all about. Moronic attacks at revolutionary leaders aligns you with the bourgeoisie in my eyes. What's next, a "shoot Mumia" game? That's about the level of maturity from shit like this.

[Deleted]

funny game. I think most people who are harch critics of the RCP do know what they are all about. It's just that they think it's something deserving of being mocked.

[Cocobanjo]

Hooray!
Finally, some truth-speaking game misunderstood as reactionary.
-[glow=red,2,300]Olini[/glow]