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It's Tuesday. May 28 and I realized that I never explained why I decided to indulge in talk about Avakian once again. I was waiting for the Bx15 Bus on 125th Street near Old Broadway when one of the usual Saturday Avakianite street corner crew approached me. Now maybe I should be harder but I have a certain sympathy for a guy who spends a three day holiday week end roaming the streets of Harlem trying to make the world a better place, so I engaged him in a brief conversation until my bus arrived. Now as things worked out (or did not work out) I ended up not driving on Sunday after wasting around an hour at the garage, so I came home and blogged. Today, Tuesday is my usual day off from rk so here I am just woke up. The guy knows how to find this blog and said he would so we can continue the conversation that way.
![[bob.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi19QqyQZGvQWQv3fGdbfNslcTurDsIEfXeSH6BvHzGB25ouQd-Q_XRWPZ9up9eJfwblkPjGnMz65OrpuupfXfGmzGnuggWrfb1zFwXPhTFIQzpBrnc_yhMGjHohzPv7TalRXS8zI8Lf2M/s1600/bob.jpg)
This image was posted in the lobby of the building where I live several Saturdays in a row as the Bob Avakian cult tried to make this image and the thoughts of the man it is modeled on household everyday concepts in the General Grant Houses here in Harlem. I don't claim to represent my neighbors but I have a strong suspicion that this two year effort is (another) a failure, as over the past few Saturdays this poster has been missing, as have the white cult followers from the nearby corner whereon they had staked out some turf nearly every Saturday morning for around two years.This whole thing saddens me greatly and I had planned not to mention this group again save they were to make a comeback on "my" corner. Just so sad to see these folks who mean so much of good intentions be so flipped out, turned inside out and be jokes for a few thousand people who ever think about them at all.
What are their good intentions? To change the world, to abolish injustice, to bring humanity back to its noble origins when our ancestors had no concept of "mine" and "not yours." I think they're all fucked up by the way and way way off course, but they mean well in their own peculiar way.
I've had some things to say about them:
Communism, or its more modern (19th and 20th Century versions) was imagined by its founder, Karl Marx, the son of a Jewish convert to nominal Lutheranism, to come about in the most advanced parts of the earth. What happened of course was something quite else and for reasons Marx would well understand the foundation of revolutionary states whose leaders espoused communism birthed distorted corrupted and moribund versions of The Dream.
This didn't help communism's public relations much in the advanced countries where The Dream of Marx the prophet would have had a better chance to grow straight and strong. (But it didn't.) While Marxism has been called and probably is a religion (with several branches most at loggerheads with each other) its founder espoused the notion that material conditions were paramount over ideas and intentions and that a society in which all is shared could not grow and survive long in terrain where what was to be shared was poverty, deprivation and attacks by internal and external forces.
You had some leaders who thought this way: "Hell, I put in my time hiding from the cops, getting bashed by them, being hunted down, getting locked up or exiled. It's my time to finally enjoy life a little bit at least." Then you had the guys who never had sacrificed, never had risked all for The Dream realizing that the new program was to be proclaimed or lip synched by anyone who wanted to obtain any advantage for self and kin.
So you had for a relatively short period of time countries where poverty and deprivation, ignorance and superstition had been the rule trying to leap over two centuries of development, in the end not to much good results, although there were certain achievements that ought not to be negated, like the vast reduction in extreme poverty in China, the ability of the Soviet Republics to repel the forces of nazism, and to bluff the west for a few decades more into thinking them much stronger than they actually were. But overall you can't deny the idea looks pretty collapsed right now and failures both real and perhaps some made up as well are what most people see in their mind's eyes when communism is mentioned.
So now we have this Avakian character and his two or three hundred hardy followers proclaiming that he, who never created anything that lasted save this small troupe, has it all figured out, how to get from here to a there that he says never really happened anyhow.
See how fucked up it gets?
This doesn't even touch on the others, little grouplets infiltrated top to bottom not only by paid informants and provocateurs but also by individuals who seek family or follow in the religion of their parents which would be by now red diaper grand children (there being a few of them around still trying to be like gramps and dad). All these little outfits recirculate recycle and most often eject one way or other people who are looking for A Dream and find family at least for a while.
So, where am I in all this? Sad for one thing. but convinced that ultimately good shall and must triumph over evii and that the meek shall inherit the earth (and everything else, too).
Some reason I say that Communism is a religion. #BobAvakian #LarryHolmes #homosexuality #GayLiberationFront #BlackPantherParty
I was raised in a religious atheist home, where the religion was a mix of ex Orthodox Jew and Mid Victorian Stalinism/Zionism which are pretty much overlapping.
mid-Victorian
(mid′vik tôr′Ä“ É™n)
.
mid-Victorian
(mid′vik tôr′Ä“ É™n)
adjective
- of, like, or characteristic of the middle part of Queen Victoria's reign in Great Britain (c. 1850-90) or the culture, morals, or art of this period
- old-fashioned, prudish, morally strict, stuffy, etc.
noun
- a person who lived during this period
- a person of mid-Victorian ideas, manners, attitudes, e.
So I was taught against sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, abortion, escapist abuse of substances and so forth.
Regarding Homosexuality my parents mouthed stuff about not using the public toilets in the subway system because homosexuals lurked to recruit boys, they having been recruited in a similar manner, or having been poor then having sold themselves to homosexuals and learned to like it. Rounding it out there were indeed pedophiles who had approached me and friends of mine at various times as I exercised a great independence of movement and travel on the buses, subways and streets starting at around age eight. (This was not uncommon in those days, almost sixty years ago.) In a more modern time I would have been grabbed by the cops, turned over to the baby snatchers along with my little sister and my parents would have been arrested. Also there was the matter of Bino, my camp counselor at Boys Club camp.
I was raised though to believe it wrong to torment, tease or harass homosexuals, just best to stay away from them.
Then the sixties. I was a bit jealous that homosexuals got a free pass out of the military draft. I knew some homosexuals who were in the army anyhow. It didn't occur to me that perhaps they had strived to conceal this from the army shrinks not because they wanted to serve but for the same reasons I would not lie and claim to be one in order to avoid the draft: stigma and perceived unemployability for having such a stain on my "permanent record." (There was no "gay" then that I can recall.)
I got active by way of a front group called "The American Servicemen's Union" in Workers World Party, and though I never formally joined there was a point they started calling me "comrade" and asking me to do this or that which most of the time I'd at least try to do. They trusted me to edit the monthly "newspaper" (The Bond) that we mailed out by a few thousand copies monthly to members of the military. This and starting to pay voluntary nominal dues and i suppose at some point I "joined." When I joined, WWP hAd a similar reputation as did Revolutionary Union and other groups of the "far left" - mid Victorian officially, though quite a few members lived in no such way.
ne fine day the official position on gays changed or was made clear to me. "Comrade so and so is gay and he is a good comrade." And I couldn't argue with that.
Around those days (my aging memories blur things a bit) the Black Panther Party was engaged in pushing and shoving matches with Gay Liberation Front members and my natural inclination was to believe that the BPP was within its rights for example to proclaim that homosexuals (they'd use more street like idioms) ought not be teachers in schools where Black children attended. " Cuba, which I admired, said that homosexuality was a disease to be treated and the Vietnamese revolutionaries denied that any such behavior existed in their realm. That was the old time religion.
The GLF by the way had as one member a guy who had been a friend of mine and who had "come put" much to my shock and disbelief during the time I was away in the army. I met up with him once after that, but it was too awkward a situation for me and I never made another contact with him.
The GLF took the position that being gay was not at all involuntary but that it was a decision, and a correct one for any revolutionary to take. This made me quite not comfortable and I guess that was the point in part. It was though a flip side to the old time religion in that it was saying that gays chose to go against nature and morals and ethics by certain translations.
Anyhow skip past those days. We've had the Stonewall riots, more and more people you'd say were educated and progress minded were endorsing "gay rights" and at one point it became more or less the consensus on the left. Then of course not too long ago our center right First Black President endorsed the right of gay people to marry each other which I felt was one of a few good reasons to oppose his opponent.
Wokers World then is a horse of a quite different color. I don't know how they deal with Stalin vs, Trotsky either publicly or internally. In my time they were trying to be secret Trotskyists, self avowed (pro) Maoists with an unusual pro Soviet leaning. I guess their old time religiosity (they did not in honesty shout it from the roof tops, it simply was understood to be the religion at the time) had to do with their trying to campflage the fact that they didn't much like or respect Stalin at all but thought that the people they wanted to align with did.
Anyhow after all the sound a fury WWP leader Larry Holmes gets 500 views on You Tube over the course of a year, and Bob Avakian fails to fill a movie show at the Magic Johnson theater after two years of exertion. Who knew?
Thursday, January 17, 2013
There's no lock on my front door and there's Maoists on my corner
Well, for anyone who's not been inside a public housing building, here it is, at 5:00 am on a Thursday morning. Some Maoists (Avakianites) have staked out the corner near my bus stop almost every Saturday for the past couple of years or so and once in a while I pause and chat with them as I wait for the Bx15. I think this Saturday I'll leave the house a little bit early and see if they'll let me video a discussion with them.
Andy Warhol (Mao)...
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