Marxism-Leninism is boring

"The Communist" was the theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. In other words, an insignificant (but surprisingly well known) Maoist group. This is the first issue of the journal, published in October 1976 and dedicated to Mao Zedong, who had died a month earlier.

It seems that the RCP were still in their orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Maoist phase when this magazine was published. Later, they would develop somewhat stranger views, including a hilarious (if you have humour) personality cult of their leader, Bob Avakian, spouting the beard of a sixties radical and the cap of a Maoist red guard. Today, the RCP are probably more Avakianist than Maoist, their Avakianism being a warmed over version of new leftish neo-Marxism.

But back in 1976, the RCP still chewed the incredibly boring and ultimately meaningless dogmatics of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought. I cannot recommend this publication. The titles of the articles says it all: "Commodities, capitalism, class divisions - and their abolition with the achievement of Communism", "Bourgeois democracy and the US working class", "Bourgeois right, economism, and the goal of the working class struggle". I had expected some sneaky preview of the RCP's later ultraleft line in the article "On the character of World War 2", but even that turned out to be standard Stalinist fare. Finally, the journal contains a polemic against the October League (the official Pekingese franchise in the United States) concerning the purported restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.

I've reviewed a later issue of this bulletin, which contained more interesting (!) articles on Albania, Bettelheim and Plato.

This issue, however, is nothing to write home about. It reads like the stale stuff they intellectually tortured people with in the Eastern bloc. Frankly, was the Jarvis-Bergman clique behind this one? ;-)