“We’re not taken in by Bob Avaaaaakian /He’s just like all the rest, and he’s mistaaaakian.

Blow your dogma out your ass /You don’t know the working class.

Bye-bye, Vanguard, bye-bye!”

Btw, I hope you understand that by calling into question the genius and (great) helmsmanship of chairman Bob that CT will shortly be host to dozens of Avakian acolytes defending his good name and the veracity of the New Synthesis!

I don’t want to take away from the comic opportunities presented by Avakian’s latest speech either. But I do also think that its unfortunate that the state of the revolutionary left in the U.S. is what it is, and thats why I welcome smart and earnest attempts like Ely’s to go beyond pointing out what is laughable about the RCP and trying to figure out what it might take to reconstitute a revolutionary left on a sounder basis, which, as I think Ely makes clear, means, among other things, a much more serious confrontation with the Stalin-era than Avakian seems interested in.

That is a great relief to know. But he has to promise. And it has to be a “cross his heart, hope to die”-type promise, because otherwise it doesn’t count.

I am very earnest, Christopher, about Stalin’s “grievous errors,” as Avakian calls them. Errors? Gosh, that does sound serious.

But what I really want to know is where does he stand on MySpace & Facebook?

When I moved to NYC for grad school, though, I was pleasantly surprised to learn of these new species of leftists and their newspaper-selling skills – the SWP, WWP, RCP, ISO, etc. Oh, the acronyms! It’s like the New Deal.

One day in Union Square, I listened to two bright-eyed young RCPers – they could not have been much older than 19 – and they told me all sorts of wonderful things about the Party, and especially about Chairman Bob.

Later I saw Chairman Bob’s movie and the RCP been my favorite leftoid sect ever since.

The critiques Ely raises are interesting, yes, but don’t seem to hit on any fundamental misdirection of the RCP…seems to focus around the theme that ‘because there isn’t a huge following, something must be wrong with the line’…but then goes on to say how NO rev. organization has mass support now. Seems like Ely is falling into what Lenin criticized as “Truth as an organizing principle”…In other words, if it works…it’s true! Therefore, if it’s NOT working, must be false. I’ll admit I didn’t read all of Ely’s work, but that seemed a theme from what I scanned.

No, no, that was the New York Review of Books. We need to do it again, even bigger. In fact, two pages might be necessary.