A Thorough Refutation of the "Crimes of Communism"

[repeater]

Based upon statistical analysis of opened soviet archives and a historical tracing of the creation of the "Crimes of Communism" as a discourse.

Check it out here and if you have a chance print it out or something:

www.geocities.com/redcomrades/lies.html

I obviously can't account for its veracity, but it certainly gives more hard data, which can easily be falsified, than anything claiming a genocide in the Soviet Union.

[repeater]

For future reference I've found the source of the American Historical Review article:

It is the American Historical Review vol. 98, no. 4, 1993, p. 1028 and is entitled Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence.

Apparently Getty also has several books based on all this material: print.google.com/print?ie=UTF-8&q=J+Arch+Getty+&btnG=Search

It seems interesting.

[flyby]

hmmmm.

I think this is a matter of great importance. And it requires some real materialism and also some courage.

We need to create the conditions (through struggle) where large numbers of people "give communism a second look."

And as everyone knows this will not be simple.

And the very least that people expect are two things:

a) an honest approach by communists about the past, that recognizes real problems, and examines them in light of a new advance to a radically different society.

b) a serious vison of how to develop a new society that people would want to live in, and that has a real chance of reaching a higher stage, a communist world.

I am not supportative of an approach that says that any serious discussoin of problems with previous socialist societies are "just lies."

There are lies, of course, and we need to expose them.

But there are also real and deep problems with previous socialist societies -- certainly in the Soviet Union udner Stalin, but even in the Soviet Union under Lenin and China under Mao.

Just brushing it away, will not help, and it only encourages a religious and non-materialist approach among communists -- like ostriches hiding from the actual history, and actual contradictions, and actual errors of the past.

Clearly, in the Chair's work on Democracy and Dictatorship -- he is arguing that there are a major series of approaches that we do not want to repeat. And he says that in general, the proletariat has not succeeded in creating societies that "people would want to live in" -- this is a rather intense, and important summation.

There is a lot to say about this.

But my point is that our task is not just "a thorough refutation" it is ALSO a deep and critical examination of the past (and a fearless summation of some important errors of the socialist project so far.)

two places i think it is important to start (if you haven't yet):

Conquer the World

rwor.org/bob_avakian/conquerworld/conquerworld_p1.htm

And Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism
rwor.org/chair_e.htm#democracyspeech

And in particular this work, which is quite remarkable on these issues:

Bob Avakian in a Discussion with Comrades on Epistemology-
On Knowing and Changing the World
rwor.org/a/1262/avakian-epistemology.htm

[flyby]

some things from the epistemology work that i think are relevant here:

"EVERYTHING THAT IS ACTUALLY TRUE IS GOOD FOR THE PROLETARIAT, ALL TRUTHS CAN HELP US GET TO COMMUNISM." (Bob Avakian)

This is a challenge to actually dig into the truth, not just brush things aside cuz they seem unpleasant or negative on our project.

In other words, no need for a coverup. If there were errors, lets talk about them. If there were things that were truely horrific, lets dig into them. If there are things to grieve, lets grieve.

And above all, lets dig into this with the orientation of learning (from real life and precious experience) how to do better in the future. And not just "hide the past to repeat the same errors again later." (what's the point of that??!)

"Some of this in Feigon book on Mao9where Mao talks to his niece on reading the Bible—responding to her question about how to "inoculate" herself against it: "just go deeply into it and you’ll come out the other side." Mao had some of this approach too, mixed in with other stuff. This has been there as an element: Mao had this aspect of not fearing to delve into things and seeking out the truth— perhaps he had this even more than Lenin—but then there’s still a question of "political truth" or "class truth" getting in the way of this. In the name of the masses—and even out of concern for the masses. Mao had great concern for the masses, but these things were contending in Mao too. "You don’t need any inoculation! Just go read it, you’ll come out the other side." [There are] definitely correct things like that with Mao, but then there’s also some "proletarian class truth," if not in the most narrow Stalinesque Lysenko way.10"

Here he is warning about a long legacy of "political truth" -- i.e. accepting as "truth" only what seems useful and positiv ein the short run.

"We should be able to get at the truth better than anybody. Our approach is not partisan in a utilitarian sense. We have an outlook and method that corresponds to a class that’s emerged in history in the broadest sense, and it can’t get itself out of this without overcoming all this stuff and transforming it all. This outlook corresponds to the proletariat’s interests, but not narrowly."

This is very different from the method on the (quite dogmato-revisionist) "Redcomrades" site... which is quite a collection of "political truths" (with blinders on.)

"It’s a tricky contradiction that, on the one hand, we have to always go for the truth—and not for "political truth" or "class truth"—and, on the other hand, we have to know how to lead without giving up the core. In taking all this up, some people are veering to social-democracy and others refuse to recognize there’s any problem here and don’t even want to criticize Stalin." And, in this situation, you can convince yourself that if you criticize Stalin then you have someone to the left of you and someone to the right and then you must be correct(!)—as opposed to whether you’re correct or not is based on whether it’s true."

And this in particular is worth thinking about and discussing:

"We have to rupture more fully with instrumentalism—with notions of making reality an "instrument" of our objectives, of distorting reality to try to make it serve our ends, of "political truth." The dynamic of "truths that make us cringe" is part of what can be driving us forward. This can help call forth that ferment so that we can understand reality. This is scientific materialist objectivity. If you go deeply enough and understand that these contradictions now posed could lead to a different era based on the resolution of those contradictions, then you want to set in motion a dynamic where people are bringing out your shortcomings. Not that every mistake should be brought out in a way to overwhelm everything we’re trying to do, but in a strategic sense [we should] welcome this and not try to manage it too much—you want that, the back and forth."

"I’m trying to set a framework for the whole approach to our project. Who’s right: me, or people who say, you can’t avoid doing things the way that people have done it up to now? Some even say: " I wish you could, but I don’t think you can." Is what I’m arguing for really a materialist way of approaching our project? Is this really what we have to go through now to get where we need to go? Is this, analogically, Einstein to Newton, or is it a bunch of nonsense—since Newtonian physics can describe the reality around us and has empirical evidence on its side? Is there in fact no other way to do what I’m arguing for, no other way to get to communism? Or is the other road really the reality of it?"

"One of the big questions is "are we really people who are trying to get to the truth, or is it really just a matter of ’truth is an organizing principle’?" Lenin criticized this philosophically—"truth as an organizing principle"—and you can criticize it to reject religion and opportunism which you don’t find particularly useful, but you can end up doing this yourself in another form. Mao said we communists stand for truth—we should be scientific and honest. Is this a concern of ours? Or is our concern to just know enough truth to accomplish our objectives as we perceive them at a given time? Just enough truth to accomplish our objectives—even if we apply this not on the most narrow level and instead our approach is that the truth we need is what we need to get to the "four alls."

I'm gonna stop now.... but there is more.

[flyby]

Here are some points i referred to from the Democracy/Dictatorship talk:

rwor.org/bob_avakian/new_speech/avakian_democracy_dictatorship_speech.htm

"I was reading an interesting comment from someone -- it was actually someone in the international movement -- and they made the point, "I uphold very firmly the experience of the socialist revolution so far, but I don't want to live in those countries" [laughter]. In other words, we have a lot of work to do, to do better the next time around. That's a very dialectical attitude. And a materialist attitude: we should uphold these things historically, there are great achievements; but we also have to build on it and go farther and do better in certain areas, or else people won't want to live in these societies -- and probably we won't either."

"So we do have to confront and combat these attacks, while at the same time squarely confronting and digging deeply into the very real shortcomings and errors. There is a real and very urgent and pressing need to refute the attacks on socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, in a thoroughgoing, deep and living way -- not a dogmatic way or stereotypical way. This is a crucial focus of the class struggle right now in the ideological realm. And how well we carry out this struggle has profound implications for work that's guided and inspired by the strategic objectives of revolution, socialism, and ultimately a communist world."

You wanna discuss what that all means? Let's dig into that!

And (a larger quote, but one worth thinking about):

"As the world exists today and as people seek to change it, and particularly in terms of the socialist transformation of society, as I see it there are basically three alternatives that are possible. One is the world as it is. Enough said about that. [Laughter].

The second one is in a certain sense, almost literally and mechanically, turning the world upside down. In other words, people who are now exploited will no longer be exploited in the same way, people who now rule this society will be prevented from ruling or influencing society in a significant way. The basic economic structure of society will change, some of the social relations will change, and some of the forms of political rule will change, and some of the forms of culture and ideology will change, but fundamentally the masses of people will not be increasingly and in one leap after another, drawn into the process of really transforming society. This is really a vision of a revisionist society. If you think back to the days of the Soviet Union, when it had become a revisionist society, capitalist and imperialist in essence, but still socialist in name, when they would be chided for their alleged or real violations of people's rights, they would often answer "Who are you in the west to be talking about the violation of human rights -- look at all the people in your society who are unemployed, what more basic human right is there than to have a job?"

Well, did they have a point? Yes, up to a point. But fundamentally what they were putting forward, the vision of society that they were projecting, was a social welfare kind of society in which fundamentally the role of the masses of people is no different than it is under the classical form of capitalism. The answer about the rights of the people cannot be reduced to the right to have a job and earn an income, as basic as that is. There is the question of are we really going to transform society so that in every respect, not only economically but socially, politically, ideologically and culturally, it really is superior to capitalist society. A society that not only meets the needs of the masses of people, but really is characterized increasingly by the conscious expression and initiative of the masses of people.

This is a more fundamental transformation than simply a kind of social welfare, socialist in name but really capitalist in essence society, where the role of the masses of people is still largely reduced to being producers of wealth, but not people who thrash out all the larger questions of affairs of state, the direction of society, culture, philosophy, science, the arts, and so on. The revisionist model is a narrow, economist view of socialism. It reduces the people, in their activity, to simply the economic sphere of society, and in a limited way at that -- simply their social welfare with regard to the economy. It doesn't even think about transforming the world outlook of the people as they in turn change the world around them.

And you cannot have a new society and a new world with the same outlook that people are indoctrinated and inculcated with in this society. You cannot have a real revolutionary transformation of society and abolition of unequal social as well as economic relations and political relations if people still approach the world in the way in which they're conditioned and limited and constrained to approach it now. How can the masses of people really take up the task of consciously changing the world if their outlook and their approach to the world remains what it is under this system? It's impossible, and this situation will simply reproduce the great inequalities in every sphere of society that I've been talking about.

The third alternative is a real radical rupture. Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto that the communist revolution represents a radical rupture with traditional property relations and with traditional ideas. And the one is not possible without the other. They are mutually reinforcing, one way or the other.

If you have a society in which the fundamental role of women is to be breeders of children, how can you have a society in which there is equality between men and women? You cannot. And if you don't attack and uproot the traditions, the morals, and so on, that reinforce that role, how can you transform the relations between men and women and abolish the deep-seated inequalities that are bound up with the whole division of society into oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited? You cannot.

So the third alternative is a real radical rupture in every sphere, a radically different synthesis, to put it that way. Or to put it another way, it's a society and a world that the great majority of people would actually want to live in. One in which not only do they not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or if they get sick whether they're going to be told that they can't have health care because they can't pay for it, as important as that is; but one in which they are actually taking up, wrangling with, and increasingly making their own province all the different spheres of society.

Achieving that kind of a society, and that kind of a world, is a very profound challenge. It's much more profound than simply changing a few forms of ownership of the economy and making sure that, on that basis, people's social welfare is taken care of, but you still have people who are taking care of that for the masses of people; and all the spheres of science, the arts, philosophy and all the rest are basically the province of a few. And the political decision-making process remains the province of a few.

To really leap beyond that is a tremendous and world-historic struggle that we've been embarked on since the Russian revolution (not counting the very short-lived and limited experience of the Paris Commune) -- and in which we reached the high point with the Chinese revolution and in particular the Cultural Revolution -- but from which we've been thrown back temporarily.

So we need to make a further leap on the basis of summing up very deeply all that experience. There are some very real and vexing problems that we have to confront and advance through.

[Repeater]

I'm glad you see the importance of looking at these things deeply. I certainly don't mean to give the impression that there were not problems in the Soviet Union, but to begin to take these things seriously we need to know exactly what the scope and scale of these problems were. In other words if we cannot or do not refute the idea that Stalin murdered 20-60 million people then we have a problem. But the fact is that this did not happen. There is no similarity in scale to what happened in the Soviet Union and the "great genocides" of the 20th century.

These documents, if you'd read them, show that through the period of 1921-53 there were 799,455 executions performed by the state. 681,692 of them were between the years of 1937-38. This is not millions of people, but it does point to a significant problem with the approach to building socialism in the Soviet Union. What we see from these documents is bureaucracy run amok, it is a good example of the banality of evil. But again it is nowhere near the scale of the crimes of the United States.

Other things that are found in these documents shows that it was not minority nationalities which took the brunt of this repression. It was not even, in the case of the population size of the penal system, a majority of political prisoners. The elites were the targets of much of this, etc.

Again I don't think this excuses it. In fact for me it makes the situation much more unnerving. These are real facts it shows more clearly than anything before the thinking, the scale, and the process through which this happened. We cannot deny these things.

The link I've given is to a site which uses these studies in a opportunist way. The rest of the documents on the site are even worse, but I have been able to track down and read the article by J. Arch Getty and it is reliable science. Part of his whole thesis is getting beyond the hyperbole and lies which have dominated discussion of the Soviet Union for so long. He flatly says that people like Robert Conquest are simply wrong about their claims and "estimates". On the other hand he seems to be saying that those on the other side of the argument faced similar problems. What he is seeking to do is get at the truth.

On the other hand, he is inherently biased against socialism. He always calls the people in the Soviet prison system "victims" regardless of their crimes. A look at the U.S. penal system which assumed everyone in it was a victim would not be taken seriously, but in the USSR it is.

From what I've gathered about his other books, he has also combatted the idea that what happened in the Soviet Union could be chalked up to Stalin's personality, and the idea that the system was totalitarian. I believe he is presenting an accurate picture.

I'm a little annoyed that I would present a great resource in terms of science and you would reject it as some kind of denial of the problems of the Soviet Union and socialism in general. Bob Avakian didn't have access to these studies when he wrote any of the things you have linked. While his thesis may be correct it is fundamentally flawed in that it has very little concrete information to go on. Here is the concrete information, it should be evaluated.

I think it is important to have an analysis on why these things happened, but first you have to know what happened.

If you have access to a library or a university, I would suggest trying to get this paper by J. Arch Getty. I printed it out from library reserves online, but you have to be a student to do that, and I can't post it unless I transcribe the whole thing by hand. I don't have the time for that.

[repeater]

This is very different from the method on the (quite dogmato-revisionist) "Redcomrades" site... which is quite a collection of "political truths" (with blinders on.)

You violate your own damn method!

This really pisses me off. You look at the site and judge it to be dogmato-revisionist, therefore nothing on it can be true. But there is significant truth in the link I gave which is, frankly, backed up by more hard fact and science than Avakian's writings on the subject.

Fuck, man. What's your problem?

[flyby2]

Reapeater: "I'm a little annoyed that I would present a great resource in terms of science and you would reject it as some kind of denial of the problems of the Soviet Union and socialism in general. Bob Avakian didn't have access to these studies when he wrote any of the things you have linked. While his thesis may be correct it is fundamentally flawed in that it has very little concrete information to go on. Here is the concrete information, it should be evaluated."

You are right that i didn't mention your Getty link in my reply, I was kinda looking to make a different point (aimed at the Redcomrades and their method, not at you.)

No reason to get annoyed over it. We aren't really required to answer EVERY point.

But let me make up for it.

First, i think it is worth turning people on to Getty's work.

I have read his books, and many of his articles, and find them quite interesting. For those who are not familiar: he has been working from the now-public archives of Soviet-era documents to "fill in the gaps" of the historicial record.

And I don't think you should assume that they are unknown to the Chairman either. The two works i cited (Dem/Dict and Epistemology) were from talks the Chairman gave recently, long after Getty's main works had been published (and after a review of Getty's book "Great Purges" appeared in A World To Win).

Part of what Getty does is pin down actual facts (and in the process undermine the exaggerated claims of Conquest et al.)

But he also does something else: he seeks to situate the events of the Stalin era in real political dynamics (take the issues out of the realm of "evil tyrant targetting one group after another").

He sees the dynamic as a matter of great weakness at the center -- a difficulty of Stalin's center in controlling the regional and national parties, and the subsequent difficulty in solving some intense problems that emerged both from the upsurge of 29-33 and from the need to prepare for extreme crisis ahead (war etc.)

Getty does not view this as "two line struggle under socialism" -- and he does not really dig into the actual programmatic and line differences between Stalin's group and the Bukharin right or the Trotsky-Zinoviev groups. And that is (in my opinion) a real weakness -- because such massive line struggles are not (i believe) simply "structural conflicts" over control, but also involve matters of line and policy (including the intense challenges of socialist industrialization and war preparation that procupied the Soviet party in the 30s.)

However, leaving aside that gap in Getty's work, he does a lot of archival summation and puts forward a lot of analysis (and in his book "The Road to Terror" provides reprints of many of the once-secret documents that dealt with the treatment and suppression of oppositional forces.)

It is of course important (on one level) to refute the claims of genocide in the Soviet Union.

However, I don't think it takes us very far to say, "The most extreme anti-communist claims that 20 million people died from the actions of the Stalin government, but the reality was in the low one or two millions." Or even to say, "Stalin may have had all these people executed, but it is less than the U.S. has killed."

I mean, sure, there is a point in both statements. And that point is that a) the reactionaries lie to make their point, which is to equate the communist movement with the worst of the Nazi movement, and put them both in the same bag, and b) there is a world of difference between the communist movement and the historic crimes of imperialism.

However, people also hold us to a higher standard. And they want to know, how they should look at this Soviet experience. Is it true that the communists will unite with people broadly to come into power, and will then just rule by force (including by directing that force as significant chunks of the people)? If that is not the plan today, how do you summ up those experiences where that seems to have happened? And why do you think it happened? How will you avoid it?

Chairman Avakian has said several times that he was really challenged when a professor asked him "what would you do differently than the Soviet Union?" He says it is not an easy question (if you are going to give a real, and serious answer.) And he say he is still thinking deeply about it (even as he offers some important new thoughts concentrated in "solid core with elasticity.")

Anyway, those are some further thoughts.

Again, I realize I didn't respond to your point on Getty, and perhaps I should have. Certainly i didn't mean to ignore your main points, but was just trying to take up the thread of your contribution.

[flyby2]

repeater writes: "You violate your own damn method!

This really pisses me off. You look at the site and judge it to be dogmato-revisionist, therefore nothing on it can be true. But there is significant truth in the link I gave which is, frankly, backed up by more hard fact and science than Avakian's writings on the subject.

Fuck, man. What's your problem?"

brother, chill.

I didn't just glance at the site. I have studied in detayl over a period of time. I never said "nothing on it can be true" --- i said their basic method was wrong. (Which is a political truth method of simply ascribing negative analyses of the USSR to "lies.")

And my basis for that is rooted in some rather intensive study of this history on my own part.

So rather than assume I just "flew off the handle" and "prooftexted" these people, perhaps we could get into the issues. Or you could ask me what kinds of things i'm referring to.

right?

[repeater]

Here is a description of Getty's book, "Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938"

Based upon archival and published sources, this book describes the events in the Bolshevik Party leading up to the Great Purges of 1937-38. Professor Getty concludes that the party bureaucracy was chaotic rather than totalitarian, and that local officials had relative autonomy within a considerably fragmented political system. The Moscow leasership, of which Stalin was the most authoritarian actor, reacted to social and political processes as much as instegating them. Because of disputes, confusion, and inefficiency, they often pushed contradictory policies. Avoiding the usual concentration on Stalin's personlaity, the author puts forward the controversial hypothesis that the Great Purges occurred not as the end product of a careful Stalin plan, but rather as the bloody and ad hoc results of Moscow's incremental attempts to centralize power.

I don't take everything that he's arguing as truth, but I think it is based upon serious scholarship, not propaganda and is a good place to start in analyzing what really happened in the USSR. Rather than starting with the polemics between the USSR and the CCP.

[repeater]

Sorry, I just got really pissed by what I saw as a basic throwing out of everything on there. I think I know what you're talking about in terms of the sites political use of truth, I went one step further and found the sources from which it is constructed.

But in one way the analysis is similar to that of Avakian's. Given the reality of what occurred in the Soviet Union, many people still wish to view the deaths of over 700,000 people as a "mistake". If you want to seriously deal with what happened we can begin with really looking at what it means to uphold the Soviet Union, while criticizing their "mistakes". Is it enough to simply say that the mistakes of the USSR were based on faulty methodology, or should we at some point also take account of the kind of human suffering that was entailed in these mistakes? Perhaps a little more humanism in Avakian's analysis would be a good thing.

[repeater]

I didn't just glance at the site. I have studied in detayl over a period of time. I never said "nothing on it can be true" --- i said their basic method was wrong. (Which is a political truth method of simply ascribing negative analyses of the USSR to "lies.")

Perhaps they go to far in ascribing all negative analysis as lies, but I find it hard to argue that Conquest is not on a grand scale a liar or that what truth he did have was manipulated. I think this is the case with the most prominent anti-soviet writers. The legacy of this is the verdict that "communism killed 100 million people," which is not true.

[flyby2]

well, yeah, robert conquest is a liar (or rather he mixes facts with exaggeration with very tenentious and reactionary summations). And we need to expose all that.

And it is important that you have raised this for discussion.

And it is valuable to learn from researchers like Getty (who at least have a healthy respect for data and the truth.)

and it is valuable that you raised the sources from Getty here.

My point was that for our project (for communist revolution) we have to much more than refute the Robert Conquests. People are asking and raising more complex problems than "was this the world's worst genocide."

And if we have a method of stubbornly defending the past as the best that was possible, we will not be able to make revolution and do better.

we are not a residue of the past. Our purpose is not mainly to "defend" what was done then. Our argument is not "it was fine, it was necessary, and accept that."

There is an element in the approach of some forces that says "Look history shows you need to suppress a lot of people after the revolution, knock a lot of heads, coerce the intellectuals to go along, and not allow any opponents to raise their head even if it means suppressing political life and discussion among the people themselves. This is simply the only road that is available."

Mao said there is a phenom of "bourgeois democrats become capitalist roaders" -- but here we are talking about a different, but related phenom "dogmato-revisionists preparing to become tyrants."

(Remember, I am not referring to you, repeater, in any of that -- i am talking about the lines that have been out there in the world and in the communist movement.)

And this is an approach that has to be challenged. And we need to learn from the Chairman about the other road he is raising -- and which he insists is both possible and necessary if we really are going to find a way to communism.

And we can't confine the discussion to the framework set by the reactionaries (i.e. just focused on purges, and "who killed more," or the lowest, cheapest level of debate.)

And our main point is not merely "defense" -- or merely "exposure of lies." We want to "set the record straight" -- by digging into the full truth, both positive and negative.

In many ways we have an independent assessment to make (independent of the whole context of anti-communist attack) -- in order to understand the process of world rev better, to learn from what was tried, and to do better.

It is a whole orientation that i'm struggling for, and it is very different from the orientation of some others around this.

And without beating it to the ground, I think it would be wrong to dismiss Conquer the World because it came out before the archival material that emerged from the Soviet union in 1992.

First of all, that archival material did not really "rock the world" -- in the sense that it exposed things that were not suspected. The main thing we need to understand the lessons of the SU is not "more archival material and data." It is a correct method and orientation for looking at the real contradictions that emerged under socialism.

Second, the importance of CTW is (among other things) its method -- what the chairman calls his "epistemlogical break" with previous ways of looking at this history (and it includes breaking precisely with this need to "defend all" or assume no errors.) That is why it was shocking that the Chairman mentioned errors and criticisms of marx and lenin and mao, not just Stalin. If we are scientific, how could we NOT have such things to sum up?

We are not a dogmatic religion where "if one tenet proves wrong the whole thing unravels." We can look deep into very wrong things that have happened, and come out the other side envigorated.

And that method (of looking at the real choices and contradictions of socialism, at how people responded to them, withwhat understanding and lines, being fearlessly materialist about following the search for truth wherever it leads and searching deep and hard for ways we could do better) is what i'm trying to understand myself, and represent here.

[Just Curious]

When you said:

Mao said there is a phenom of "bourgeois democrats become capitalist roaders" -- but here we are talking about a different, but related phenom "dogmato-revisionists preparing to become tyrants."

Were you upholding this criticism? Or trying to take it apart?

[flyby2]

I'm not sure what you are asking.

There is a major phenom of "bourgeois democrats becoming capitalist roaders."

But there is also a phenom where the dogmato-revisionist approach to politics, their vision of what socialism is, and the logic of how they would build a revolutionary struggle -- that means that if they even get power, they can't do anything good with it.

That is the point i'm making.

and it underscores the importance of doing something different,and better -- which is the reenvisioning of the revolutionary process and the socialist road that Chairman Avakian has developed (and that he consentrates in the expression "solid core with a lot of elasticity."