First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 37, September 25, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The so-called “memorial meetings” for Mao Tsetung, sponsored last week by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), marked a new low, even for this band of anti-China scabs.
Bob Avakian, the RCP’s leader, rambled on for over three hours in their New York and San Francisco meetings, denouncing socialist China and openly supporting the “gang of five” (referring to the “gang of four” plus Mao himself).
Preparation for the two meetings had been the RCP’s only work for more than six months. Those who remain in the badly-split organization frenziedly ran around the country putting up posters advertising the event. Everywhere, and especially in the Chinese communities, the posters were torn from the walls.
Thousands of dollars which came from a reported several-million-dollar gift (given by the bourgeoisie to Avakian personally) were spent to transport Avakian followers in chartered planes to both cities. But even with the fanatical mobilization of every anti-China element they could muster, from open Trotskyites to the dregs of the pro-Soviet “left,” the meetings could only assemble a thousand or so in New York and considerably less than that in San Francisco.
Avakian’s speech was primarily directed against the late Premier Chou En-lai, for half a century the closest comrade-in arms of Chairman Mao. But it also heaped abuse on Mao himself. Speaking in a style that bordered on hysteria, Avakian slandered Chou as “a bourgeois democrat” and tried to connect Mao with the “gang of four.”
Of course, not one shred of factual evidence was presented. Rather Avakian used the method of half truths and his own subjective assumptions. As one spectator observed, “He would present things as though they were accepted facts, but precede them with, ’We can assume that.. . or ’Certainly this means...’”
Avakian even attacked Chairman Mao for his principled stand against Soviet social-imperialism and revisionism, claiming that Mao’s position that the USSR is the most dangerous superpower arose from nationalism. He then claimed that the theory of three worlds developed by Chairman Mao had no strategic importance for the working class movement, but rather was only “tactical.”
It was clear, as Avakian rehashed all the lines taken by the “gang of four,” that they are his real mentors. For example, he echoed the “gang’s” attacks on the veteran cadres of the party, claiming that because they took part in the democratic stage of the revolution they were “bound to become bourgeois democrats.”
Avakian then went on to support the Vietnamese in their Soviet-sponsored attack on China and Kampuchea, claiming that China is using its aid to “bully” the third world into following its line.
This speech must have more than repaid the bourgeoisie for their recent “grant” to the RCP.
Genuine revolutionaries who at one time or another were influenced by the Avakian line should be thankful for this open self-exposure. Now that Chairman Mao is dead, Avakian is saying what he was afraid to say when Chairman Mao was alive.
The only truth we can gather from his speech is that there really is a “gang of five”–the four traitors in China plus one American who is quite willing to regurgitate all of their teachings here in the U.S.A.