House Party for BA Everywhere
February 15, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a Reader
A few nights ago, nine of us met and broke bread together, celebrating and contributing money to the BA Everywhere campaign. We had a great dinner, took up donations of $150 and talked intensely about the state of the world and the need for a new world, and then followed up dinner by watching BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! We watched the sections "Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First"; "Emancipating Humanity... Transforming Conditions and Transforming Human Nature"; and "Revolution is Possible: The Strategy for Revolution."
Some people at the fundraising dinner had been born, or had lived in, countries in North Africa and the Middle East. A very sharp question at the dinner was how are we going to break through a situation where “two outmodeds” oppose each other as well as reinforce each other? U.S. imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism battle each other in this region, and the revolutionary communist forces have been set back over the past decades.... It’s beyond the scope of this letter to get into all that we touched on. We discussed the new issue of Demarcations: A Journal of Communist Theory and Polemic at the dinner, and encouraged people to dig into the new issue. We scheduled a time to talk about it.
One thing we discussed in some depth is the reality that the rise of fundamentalism is not the continuation of age-old religiosity in some historically linear sense, that there are underlying reasons why fundamentalism has been and is growing in today’s world—economic, political, social, cultural and historical factors, and that all this has had very contradictory effects on the masses of people, in their conditions of life and on their ideology. People hadn’t heard this put quite this way before. For example, globalization and its effects, including uprooting the traditional ways of life of tens of millions of people in the countrysides of these Third World countries—urbanizing vast numbers without them being integrated into the “formal economies” of these countries—has a great deal to do with this growth of religious fundamentalism. And there are major political changes that have occurred in the world over the past 40 years, especially the loss of socialist China. And there is more to such a complex question as well.
One person at the house party had been in Egypt in 1966, going to school. She described a situation in Cairo in 1966 where she never saw a woman in a head scarf (hijab), yet today in Cairo and throughout the country they are worn by many women. What is to account for this change? These were issues we were discussing. She was in Egypt during the rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser. We discussed that not only has there been the defeat of socialist China and the end of stage of communism, but imperialism has also worked to undermine secular nationalist opposition in these regions as well, with some success. Her point amplified that this situation where fundamentalism is growing (and where there is the growth of religion generally) is a peculiar phenomenon of the recent decades, not a continuation of age-old religion but a new feature in a changed world, largely the result of the effects of imperialist globalization—especially urbanization and shantytown-ization—taking place in these countries. One person zeroed in on the role of satellite TV in the Middle East—how preachers dominate satellite TV now and are all over the Internet and social media in areas of these Middle Eastern and North African countries.
After discussing this over dinner, we were struck by the sections from BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, in his discussion of U.S. imperialism and the growth of religious fundamentalism and how to bring forward another way for humanity. In one section we watched BA breaks down the revolutionary strategy. He places major emphasis on building up a critical mass of communists in this current situation—emphasizing the huge difference that could make in bringing forward another way for humanity. BA was talking about the revolutionary strategy in the U.S. in this section but his comments about the need for a critical mass of communists (trained in the “new synthesis”) resonated with our group as something not only important for the U.S. We’d just been digging into the questions above and his comment about the need for a critical mass of communists had global significance.
The discussion above opened up for people questions about the loss of socialist China and the significance of that. One man from North Africa talked about how the imperialists “leapt upon” the defeat in China (he said “leapt upon the fall of communism”) and we grappled with this. This discussion on the underlying factors leading to the rise of fundamentalism sharpened to a real extent the great significance of the loss of revolutionary China, and why there’s been an “ideological shift” over these past decades. Such discussion helped people gain a materialist grasp of what are in fact very negative changes, helped us confront the world as it is, but also underscored that these changes are not, fundamentally, a permanent fixture on the world scene....
We do have a world historic challenge in front of us, no doubt about that! But in confronting that challenge, we need to understand the underlying factors leading to the growth of religion and fundamentalism, or else we won’t be able to bring forward another way. We talked about how there are trends, including so called “communist” trends, that oppose BA’s new synthesis, that have as one feature of their method dismissing this whole phenomena, for all intents and purposes. But we pointed out that there is no possible way to bring forward another way for humanity without doing scientific work on this question of the growth of fundamentalism and treating this phenomena, and the religious sentiments of people, very seriously. We said we do not think—and we struggled some over why—we should not “tail” religious sensibilities, but we do have to understand why people hold these views. There is a great part in the section "Transforming Conditions and Transforming Human Nature" from BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! that we watched that shed light on how a movement for revolution can play a big role in providing much more favorable soil for people throwing off unscientific and reactionary ideological frameworks (in the face of tremendous uncertainty and dislocation in their lives) because of a materialist grounded hope that people see and feel and are a part of when revolution has its day. BA speaks of the 1960s in this section, when many Black radicals threw off religious belief as part of a revolutionary movement, illuminating how the notion that Black people are “inherently” religious is a fallacy.
People were righteously angry at the new land grab by U.S. imperialism and other imperialists in Africa. This was a running theme throughout the evening. Many examples were given by people from these regions about how imperialist agribusinesses are grabbing up huge swaths of land in Africa, undermining rural agriculture. There was tremendous outrage over the fact that people in their tens and hundreds of millions are barely staying alive or are dying while a miniscule stratum of people work “hand in glove” with the imperialists to rape these countries.
There was debate at the dinner revolving around why it is wrong to think in terms of—and to use—broad generalizations to characterize people from this or that country, or making broad generalizations about this or that ethnicity from this or that region or country. For example, one person at the dinner said she does not like the cultural ways of a people from an adjoining country from where she is from, and insisted on this—though she made a caveat... I know you don’t agree (speaking of one of us who’d argued with her about this numerous times before). Some at the party were extraordinarily upset—and rightly so—about the literal enslavement of North African women in some countries of the Middle East, but part of their anger was directed toward “the Arabs”—using a very broad brush. Another person referred to a country where many millions have died in the last 20 years—the Congo—and said it is near impossible to imagine that people can raise their sights to anything different than what is immediately before them in a divide-and-conquer situation when individuals confront armed militias right up in their face.
We wrestled with the particularities being brought up. All this painfully showed that what is missing in these countries are vanguard communist organizations that can point the way out of these outrages, which are essentially the result of imperialist domination. We discussed the ideological difference between nationalism and internationalism. How whether you come from a Third World country or an oppressor country like the U.S. the whole world comes first. We spoke of the significance of BA’s new synthesis in light of these seemingly intractable problems, including how internationalism—and being internationalist in your world outlook and not nationalist, no matter what country you are from or living in—is an important core element of the new synthesis.
Finally, at the end of dinner and right before we were to turn on BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, one person asked: what will it take for a scientific revolution? He asked, “...not just for a few people, but for everyone to become scientific?” We all talked about this being “a historic problem”: a relatively small section of society working with their minds and the millions and billions working with their backs. We discussed how the “new synthesis” comes at this contradiction in a new way, building on past experience, but really bringing forward a new model on how to tackle this contradiction today, and in a new socialist society. We then went to the den and got into BA’s new film which is a living example of this, especially in this sense: it is truly a great way for everyone to be introduced to why revolution is necessary and how it's possible. It can break down for people from many walks of life the science and vision of revolution and communism. After we showed the film, a brief comment was addressed to the people at the house party about the significance of their contributions to the BA Everywhere campaign that night and importance of their involvement in the BA Everywhere campaign in an ongoing way.
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