June 28, 2026
“Communism: A Whole New World and the Emancipation of All Humanity—Not ‘The Last Shall Be First, and The First Shall Be Last’” is a two part audio talk from Bob Avakian from 2006 (click these links to listen to Part 1 and Part 2).
Like a great and expansive work of art, or play, or concerto, this talk deserves and rewards repeated listens. It is also in my view a criminally underappreciated and underutilized part of BA’s expansive body of work. Stumbling across it is like discovering a lost studio session, or Bob Dylan’s basement tapes; a forgotten painting found in the corner of some attic. This talk in particular, I believe, needs to be grappled with very seriously and deeply by all those in and around the movement for revolution at this very time, as well as popularized more broadly among anyone who is serious about wanting a better world.
In this talk, Bob Avakian (BA) starts with the abolition of the 4 alls. (The “four alls” refers to a formulation by Marx in which he gives a basic summation of the aims of the communist revolution. Marx wrote that the socialist state, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the necessary transit to the abolition of all class distinctions (or class distinctions generally); the abolition of all the production relations on which those class distinctions rest; the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to those production relations; and the revolutionizing of all the ideas that correspond to those relations.)
These 4 alls remain the vantage point for the remainder, the measuring stick by which BA evaluates a range of approaches, theories, philosophical frameworks, and programs that fall short of what is necessary, possible, and desirable: the emancipation of all humanity. His opening argument is this: masses of people, in their millions, who are won to the revolution, and make up the backbone force of this struggle, will do so primarily NOT on the basis of a scientific understanding of, and commitment to, the long struggle to abolish these 4 alls, but of, in essence, “They had their go. Now it’s our turn.” This will be contradictory; people will be a “mixed bag” of this sentiment and loftier ones. But this is a scientific fact that must be understood, and correctly handled, by the vanguard force. Lived with and transformed. However, the next point, made twenty years ago, is of utmost importance, still not well understood among the ranks of the revolution, and is clearly something we are still (largely) on the losing end of now: While this will be the orientation of millions of masses of people who make up the revolutionary people, it CANNOT be the orientation (at least not principally) of the vanguard force (the third condition for a revolutionary situation1).
There’s also an incredibly rich, detailed, and living elucidation of “what are classes?” as described by Lenin (the three components of classes), as part of BA's also incredibly rich, detailed, and living exposition of the four alls. It is here that he makes the following remarkable observation (and I’m paraphrasing): With all of the complexity involved in classes, and the production relations on which classes rest, involving not only the ownership question, but also the social division of labor and the division of social wealth (as well as the means through which that wealth is distributed), it becomes readily apparent that all of the frameworks BA takes apart throughout this talk come nowhere near abolishing even one (or two) of the four alls.
The entirety of this talk is important, and the taking on (and taking apart) of various political frameworks – anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, upholding the Paris Commune in opposition to the further advances of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the development of a “worker’s republic” and the associated “workerism” and economism, the reification of the proletariat, determinist realism, revenge and “the last shall be first and the first shall be last,” the theory of the productive forces, crisis theory (mentioned briefly), Menshevism, and more – is a masterclass (or a series of masterclasses), and should be deeply studied.
But it is particularly the section on reification and positivism, economism and syndicalism, vulgar materialism instead of dialectical materialism that I want to focus on. For starters, the refutation of reification. BA is identifying, in a way that I think portends what we’re facing now, how reification is both a long-standing problem in the international communist movement and among the revcoms (the history of the Party, Maoism generally, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, etc.), AND is very much bound up with the identity politics that exist on a whole other level today (i.e. its mutated “woke” iteration) than when this talk was given, twenty years ago. BA also notes that reification of the proletariat (or other oppressed groups) takes both blatant and more subtle forms. The blatant form is illustrated in his example of Menshevism within the leadership of the Party itself at the time of the split around the coup in China where someone argued, "Would this be 'A WORKER’S PARTY' or a communist party," the former being almost openly religious worship of the proletariANS, or (corresponding to the latter) the recognition of the scientifically understood historic potential of the proletariAT as a class? But, as BA explains, this reification takes less overt forms as well. “Are we going to tail the masses, or this particular ‘mass’ because they come from among the oppressed or they come from the proletariat?” This is something that, as a movement, we still struggle with, to put it mildly. And it’s connected to what BA discusses next – positivism.
Positivism as a worldview, or epistemological framework, reduces knowledge to what is immanently observable through the five senses; to sensory experience, or, perhaps, to “chains of causal sequences which is in a sense flat and linear.” It negates the leap from perceptual to rational/conceptual knowledge, the process of analysis and synthesis, and the role of abstraction from sensual reality in order to identify patterns, correlations between phenomena, and relations between different forms of matter in motion. Thus, it negates science and the need thereof. This empiricist, positivist, reductionist, mechanical materialist (and thus non-materialist) approach to understanding and acting upon reality is, in my view, at the root of many of the subjective problems that the movement for revolution based on the new communism is currently facing, and thus deserves further attention. I will briefly elaborate here further, but the talk itself, and perhaps other resources that either already exist or can be developed, should (in my view) be seriously grappled with, including by drawing on examples in our own thinking and practice, while comparing/contrasting with the approach of BA.
As mentioned above, there is an important link between positivism and reification: If all knowledge derives from sensory experience, or is immanently knowable, available on the surface without the tools of science, abstraction, drawing from different spheres of reality and knowledge, etc., then the proletariat and other oppressed groups, through virtue of their experience of oppression (their position in society) would have the necessary knowledge of this oppression: Where it comes from, what causes it, how to overcome it. All such knowledge would be apprehendable via lived experience, or at least through the accumulated wisdom of these social groupings. Thus the negation of the need for science, the scientific method, theory, and therefore leadership, advanced leaders, etc.
So reification and positivism are closely linked. And both are huge problems in our movement: positivism as it relates to reification (and reification is not reducible to positivism as a fallacy), and as it manifests in other ways. For example, BA discusses in this talk the link between positivism and various forms of determinism, including the determinist realist approach of not recognizing the possibility of qualitative change, and the connection between the underlying dynamics of things interacting with accident, or with other phenomena in a different sphere, to lead to radical transformations in the objective situation. Positivism is a form of “skimming on the surface,” and basically being whipped around by reality while perhaps appearing to think like a materialist (looking at “material causes” of phenomena, but only in the most linear, two dimensional, reductionist sense, and without dialectics).
Lastly, I want to discuss the role of consciousness as developed by BA in this section of the talk. After an important discussion of the application of positivist reductionism to the study of human society, where it often manifests as economic determinism and a negation of the relative autonomy of the superstructure in relation to the economic structure/base (as well as the role of accident and contingency in causing non-linear change in contrast to such determinist views), BA draws on Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in linking determinism (which itself, as he shows, derives from the epistemological approach of the positivist package, applied to the study of history and human society) to revisionism.
One marked feature of this determinist revisionism is an unscientific understanding of consciousness. Human consciousness, as BA lays out here, is a particular form of matter in motion. But it is indeed particular; an utterly unique phenomenon which can understand and act upon (very complex) necessity, transforming it into freedom. It is an incredibly dynamic phenomenon: able to work with and make abstractions, develop conceptual knowledge on the basis of analysis and synthesis of abstractions, etc. And, importantly, in opposition to positivo-reductionist renderings which view consciousness as a more or less direct extension of economic and other social factors (or genes), consciousness is both ultimately rooted in the material reality from which it derives; AND is not reducible to that. Much as theory can and must “run ahead” of practice, consciousness can and does run ahead of the material conditions out of which it emerges.
So, while there’s more than can be said on this, the point is that there’s an incredibly scientific, dialectical materialist discussion here of consciousness, demarcated with a variety of unscientific (but widely held and propagated) views on consciousness. Also, this scientific understanding of the dynamic role of consciousness in shaping reality (not unmoored from, but on the basis of understanding deeply and acting to transform, material reality as it exists) is at the heart of BA’s body of work as a whole, and of the new communism, particularly its method and approach. As a dear comrade and friend said recently, BA is an “anti-inevitabilist.” Why? Because of his ruptures with ways of thinking and acting in the communist project that were counter to science, including determinism, reification, elements of positivism, reductionism, etc. This is why STRUGGLING LIKE FUCKING HELL WITH THE MASSES OF PEOPLE, THE FUTURE BACKBONE OF THIS REVOLUTION, is CENTRAL to BA’s breakthroughs in revolutionary orientation and strategy (which, like all of his breakthroughs, ultimately stem from his epistemological rupture2).
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Footnotes:
1. In a recent major talk, Avakian describes the three conditions for revolution as:
A revolution becomes possible, even in a powerful country like this, when three main factors have been brought into being:
A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the “usual way of doing things,” that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the “normal” way that people have been conditioned to accept.
A revolutionary people in the millions and millions, with their “allegiance” to this system broken, and their determination to fight for a more just society greater than their fear of the violent repression of this system.
An organized revolutionary force—made up of continually growing numbers of people, from among the most oppressed but also from many other parts of society—a force which is grounded in, and is working systematically to apply, the most scientific approach to building for and then carrying out revolution, and which is increasingly looked to by masses of people to lead them to bring about the radical change that is urgently needed. (HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness?) [back]
2. The character of this is described in the first of the Six Resolutions from the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party:
Resolution 1:
The new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian, on the basis of 40 years of revolutionary work, represents a qualitative advance in the scientific approach to making revolution and emancipating humanity. It provides the foundation and point of departure for a new stage of communist revolution that is urgently needed in the world today.
Where there is oppression, there will be resistance—the masses of people will continually rise up against their conditions of oppression and those who enforce this oppression. But, without the necessary scientific theory and leadership, the struggle of the oppressed will be contained, and remain confined, within the system which is the source of oppression, and the horrors to which the masses are subjected will go on, and on. The new synthesis and the leadership of Bob Avakian represents and embodies the scientific understanding and approach the masses of the oppressed need to make the revolution they need—a revolution whose ultimate goal is a communist world—to emancipate themselves and ultimately humanity as a whole.
As Bob Avakian himself has emphasized, the new synthesis:
represents and embodies a qualitative resolution of a critical contradiction that has existed within communism in its development up to this point, between its fundamentally scientific method and approach, and aspects of communism which have run counter to this.
And:
What is most fundamental and essential in the new synthesis is the further development and synthesis of communism as a scientific method and approach, and the more consistent application of this scientific method and approach to reality in general and in particular the revolutionary struggle to overturn and uproot all systems and relations of exploitation and oppression and advance to a communist world. This method and approach underlies and informs all the core elements and essential components of this new synthesis.
As with all scientific approaches to understanding and transforming reality, communism must continue to develop, and it has undergone a qualitative development with the new synthesis, which is a leap beyond, and in some important ways a rupture with, what has gone before. Recognizing this is the essential dividing line today between genuine revolutionary communists and those who may profess to be for communism and revolution, but who in fact are not. Just as, in 1975, being a communist meant being a follower of Mao and the path that he had forged, so today being a communist means following Bob Avakian and the new path that he has forged. [back]