from Annie Day, Director, The Bob Avakian Institute
February 2, 2026
The article in this month's Rolling Stone, "The Anti-Fascist Group Fighting Trump—And Some Critics on the Left," by David Peisner is a lazy and dishonest distortion of the work of Bob Avakian, the revolutionary leader and architect of the new communism.
Relying on unthinking anti-communism, it serves as a justification for ignoring the challenge in Avakian's work to confront what we are facing with Trump/MAGA fascism, to seriously examine the fact that this fascism has its roots in U.S. capitalism-imperialism, and to act commensurate with the urgent dangers we face. This includes being willing to have your fundamental assumptions challenged and your sights raised beyond this horrific system. Instead, Peisner disguises intellectual cowardice as "reportage": go nowhere near Avakian's work and do not work with the revolutionaries who advocate for this work—if you do you will be deemed ineffectual and sidelined.
With the future hanging in the balance amidst accelerating fascism, climate catastrophe, genocide and the danger of nuclear war, no one should accept this cynical dismissal of the most burning questions confronting humanity: whether a radically different, and far better, society is possible. This is what Bob Avakian's work concentrates, and why it demands serious engagement.
Peisner's article is supposed to be about Refuse Fascism, an organization begun in 2016 with the demand: In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America! As their website says, they are "on a mission to unite all who can be united into the largest nonviolent mass mobilization in U.S. history to drive out the Trump Fascist Regime—a regime that threatens humanity’s very future." The real message of Peisner's article is that, while there may be good-hearted people with Refuse Fascism, they cannot succeed because there are people within it who base themselves on the new communism developed by Avakian.
But after 3,000 words, you are left utterly ignorant of the substance of this. While Peisner mentions Bob Avakian's name 30 times, he says nothing about the content of BA's work. He says that Avakian has been sounding the alarm about the rise of fascism in the U.S. for 30 years but is completely lacking in curiosity as to why Avakian has been so far-sighted and prescient or what the content of this analysis is. The fact is that Avakian's work on fascism has been way ahead of the curve, and humanity would be in a far better situation if people had not ignored and dismissed these warnings the way Peisner does, but had actually listened and acted on Avakian's analysis—years ago!
Since 1996, Avakian has dug into how the economic and social changes within the U.S. and internationally have given rise to a Christian fascist program among a section of the rulers who feel this represents the only way to rescue their system. In 2017, while people were still befuddled as to why Christian fascists would find a partner in Trump, Avakian spoke to "the unholy alliance" Trump made with these Christian fascists. Avakian has, since 2016 warned against all those who have underestimated and normalized Trump/MAGA fascism. He's dug into the coherence of this fascist ideology in the triad of white supremacy, patriarchy and a belligerent America-first chauvinism—all of which are rooted in the American Confederacy. As such, Avakian recognizes that the social base for this fascism is not a product of "economic grievance," but those who find their interests in defending all this oppression. Avakian has taken on the illusions that you can rely on the Democratic Party, or normal channels of this same system, to defeat fascism. He recognizes that while individual Democratic Party politicians may play a role in standing up against this fascism, the Democratic Party as an institution cannot fight this fascism the way it needs to be fought. While fascism is rapidly accelerating, these are life and death questions around which Peisner is utterly silent.
Even more, the prospects of a revolution and radically different system are completely written off in Peisner's view. He says that the "The RCP claims Avakian has synthesized a new, more scientific version of communism that represents nothing less than a 'whole new framework for human emancipation'... The issue some on the far left have with Avakian isn’t so much his ideas or motives, which overlap those of many communist organizations, but rather the way the RevComs deify him."
The fact is that those who take issue with Avakian do so exactly because of "his ideas and motives." Avakian is working on what would be required to make an actual revolution to end oppression and exploitation. The people Peisner quotes are working on building movements of opposition that do not step outside of, or fundamentally challenge, the confines of this system. Instead of making a substantive argument, they just use the magic word "cult" to shut down any serious debate.
In a social media message last year titled "Mindless Anti-Communism and Mindless Accusations of 'Cult': Brainwashing to Shut Down Critical Thinking and Fundamental Opposition to this Monstrous System" Avakian talked about the way the movements in the 1960s challenged the widespread anti-communism which is akin to the accusations of cult. "Today, along with the continuing slander and ideological assault against communism, there is this other form of brainwashing, which is perpetrated not just by traditional representatives of the ruling class but also by various opportunist forces which claim to be 'woke' or 'progressive,' or 'socialist,' but which do not seek solutions that actually break through and beyond the confines of this system and do not offer any really emancipating alternative."
The heart of Peisner's argument for how revcoms "deify" Avakian is the fact that "The party’s website calls Avakian 'the most important political thinker and leader in the world today,' and declares that 'being a communist today means following Bob Avakian and the new path he has forged.'" These statements are either true or false. A reply from the revcoms to another crude attack on Avakian by Hannah Zeavin spoke to exactly this same idiotic argument:
Clearly, what is involved in these statements has to do with matters of great, indeed of world historic, importance: would any serious and decent person deny that it is of world historic importance whether “a whole new framework for human emancipation” has actually been developed? Flowing from that, whether these statements regarding BA are true, or not, is itself of very great significance. The fact is that BA has actually developed a whole new framework for human emancipation. But to judge whether that is true, or not, requires first of all caring about human emancipation; and it requires some work, in order to have the basis to make a rational judgment about this. Assuming that (despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary) Zeavin actually recognizes the importance of intellectual integrity, the only honest answer she could give to the question of whether these statements about BA are true, or not, is: “I don’t know. I cannot say, because I have not done the work to have the necessary basis to evaluate this. But I am going to seriously look into this, because of its objective importance.”
While Peisner notes that Avakian is "a prolific writer, publishing more than a dozen books," he also says that Avakian is "enigmatic." This would be laughable if the idiocy weren't so harmful: if you wanted this alleged "mystery" solved, you'd have to open one of those dozen books or read his work or watch interviews or listen to his social media messages—all of which are readily available, and all of which Peisner studiously ignores!
As to the content of the new communism that Avakian has developed, C. Clark Kissinger, a longtime activist and revolutionary recently wrote the following:
It is important to understand that the body of work that Avakian has created is not an add-on, a refinement, or a particular application of Marxism. Rather it is a qualitative leap in the science itself, comparable to the leap made by Marx. At the time of Marx, capitalism had consolidated state power in America and the major states of Europe, and was spreading across the globe like a metastatic cancer. Humanity had nothing to confront it with save bourgeois democracy, syndicalism, or utopian concepts of socialism, often based in religion. Marx changed all that with a scientific explanation of the capitalist system and what had to be done to abolish it.
Today, with the defeat of the great revolutions of the 20th century, the globalization of capitalist production, the existential climate threat to the planet, and the world-wide spread of fascist movements, the old tools of bourgeois liberalism, social-democratic labor movements, and even the best of past communist thought, have been shown to be utterly inadequate to the challenges facing humanity. It is at this point that Bob Avakian has stepped forward to address what has to be done, but with a qualitatively transformed and more scientific, evidence-based method and approach. Avakian has given humanity the tools for its next great leap.
The fact that the editors of Rolling Stone chose to publish this kind of vacuous garbage about something so significant is irresponsible and an indictment of a culture that skims on the surface, profoundly lacking in critical thinking and rigor.
For those who care about the extreme injustice being brought down on people here and all over the world: our heating planet, genocide and war, our neighbors kidnapped, the rule of law shredded, protest criminalized... for those who refuse to give in to the hopelessness and complicity and want to know whether a radically different future is possible, don't listen to the cynical naysayers and upholders of the status quo, have the courage and integrity to look into Bob Avakian's work for yourself.