Comrades from around the world produced a document - THE INTERNATIONAL UNITY OF THE COMMUNISTS REQUIRES THE DEFEAT OF AVAKIANIST REVISIONISM, CENTRISM AND ALL FORMS OF REVISIONISM! - rejecting avakianism, which is something that certainly not speak to people here in our country.

The word “avakianism” is derived from Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. This party upheld formerly Maoism, but moved to bourgeois rationalism in its struggle against the amazing weight of religion in the United States.

This phenomenon is easy to understand, as something really neared happened in France in the 1960's-1970's. Revolutionaries upheld Maoism, but then discovered that what was Maoism was more than “It's right to rebel”.

As it was strictly impossible for them to accept Dialectical Materialism and the principle of the universe is going inevitably to communism, they modified Maoism or dropped it. Trotskyism has done this already in the 1920's, “accepting” Marx but totally rejecting Engels and the dialectics of nature.

Today, apart of the CPMLM, people defining themselves as “Maoists” reject dialectics of nature, limiting Marx' teachings to “class struggle”.

The Organization “Voie Prolétarienne” even rejects totally Stalin (and so dialectics of nature, socialist realism, etc.) and the group “Red Flag” even jibes the CPMLM because “it advances the thesis of the inevitable march towards communism of the Universe and other delusional statements of the same ilk.”

In fact, this French rationalist bourgeois tradition exists since long. At the end of the 19th century, French social-democracy didn't even know practically Marx's documents of economy, let's imagine what the situation was about dialectics of nature.

At the beginning of its existence in France, the Communist Party was full of trade-unionist cultures and if it accepted dialectical materialism, it was in the sense of bourgeois rationalism.

In fact, the Communist Party did in France what it did in the eastern european countries and even in the USSR: accepting materialism until the recognition of dialectical movement of a phenomenon, but not understanding the global dialectical movement of matter at the universal scale.

That's why Mao Zedong theorized the Cultural Revolution as a weapon to accompany the dialectical universal movement of matter, and upheld that nothing is indivisible to that it was possible to understand the universe as an onion, with interpenetrating layers.

The position against dialectics of nature meant to go, at the best to a strong left social-democratic point of view, or to bourgeois rationalism from the time of the Age of Enlightenment, the 18th century.

Avakianism is, so, only an American national form of this social-democratic – bourgeois rationalist tendency, carried by progressive petty bourgeois seeing the reactionary aspect of the bourgeois, but certainly not able to accept the ideology of the working class.

Even people moving out of the RCP,USA and Avakianism stay trapped in bourgeois rationalism, like the horrible revisionist blog “Kasama”, or the RCP, Canada, which professes the same non ideological / non “dogmatic” Maoism like so many student parties in the 1960's. Prachandism is here another thing; its revisionist nature rely on a different basis (see Are avakianism and prachandism the same? The error of the MPP).

Avakianism has already existed in France: the ideologies of the most interesting organizations in the 1960's-1970's – Vive la Révolution and the Gauche Prolétarienne – were already full of subjectivism, seeing revolution as the best moral option, and not a historical necessity coming from the dialectical evolution of matter.

Avakianism is in fact post-Maoism, and in France there is a strong tradition of picking some stuff in Mao, reducing Maoism to some writings, with People's War and Rebellion being understood as “methods” or “myths”, in the sorelian-blanquist tradition which is so strong in France.

Avakianism exist also as an international bourgeois mediatic philosophy: the former French Maoist Alain Badiou and the slovene freudo-marxist Slavoj Žižek are celebrated as the thinkers of a “radical option”, a “revolutionary choice” that would be possible.

Of course, all this people, from Canada to France, from Badiou to Avakian, reject Stalin. Stalin appears as the keeper of the “dogmatic” character of Maoism, as the keeper of dialectics of nature, and because of this, they must reject Stalin.

That is why on the other side, the CPMLM in France affirmed the value and the validity of soviet science, especially with Maxim Gorky on socialist realism, Vladimir Vernadsky on Biosphere, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky on space colonization, the rejection of neo-darwinism and the affirmation in chemistry that life is matter in movement...

In fact, what is the opposite of avakianism? The affirmation of the reflection theory. This is the great task to protect and develop dialectical materialism.