J. Moufawad-Paul - Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT

CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE

This is a fascinating must-read and highly readable book; even if you disagree with the authors arguments, you will reconsider much of the rhetoric that we take for granted regarding Maoism. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States

Continuity and Rupture is Moufawad-Pauls theorization of a political and revolutionary thought of today. This book offers an active framework for understanding the Maoist turn in Marxism, which the author grounds in a challenging vision of history and a necessity for social change.

Julian Jason Haladyn, author of Boredom and Art

Capitalism is headed for disaster. Any serious attempt to alter the course of history requires revolutionary theory. Whether you agree with J. Moufawad-Pauls conclusions or not, this book raises the questions we all need to ask.

Gabriel Kuhn, author of Life Under the Jolly Roger and Turning Money Into Rebellion

Calling all organizers, anti-capitalists, and people who care about anticolonial struggle this book is for you. Beautifully clear, Moufawad-Paul lays out the concepts that we almost never get to learn in our schools or in our social movementsthe concepts that many have struggled to grasp and applythe concepts that are necessary for revolution. Placing the tools of western philosophy in the service of explicating the significance and necessity of actually-existing Maoism, this book is an accessible and compelling primer in science, theory, philosophy, and revolution. This book is just in time. At its heart, it is an historical materialist account of the unfolding of revolutionary praxis through the rupture and continuity of Marxist-Leninism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Moufawad-Paul begins his periodization and clarification of Maoism from the revolutionary theory of the Community Party of Peru and the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan situated in the global struggle against capitalism-imperialism. And for you, eurocentric academic Marxists: you have been put on noticeyou cant say you havent been told.

Rachel Gorman, Associate Professor in Critical Disability Studies, York University

Moufawad-Pauls Continuity and Rupture is a much welcomed attempt to bring philosophical clarity to political debates which all too often are wrapped around vague terms at the expense of conceptual clarity. Its central thesis claims that Maoism is a coherent theoretical development that both continues the revolutionary content of Leninist theory and breaks with its historical limitations, thus opening up a new set of theoretical possibilities ultimately rooted in the scientific propositions of historical materialism. It is a provocative thesis, but one that is lucidly explored by Moufawad-Paul. This is a book that should renew interest in historically concrete forms of Marxist theory and produce spirited, but invaluable, debate on the nature of Maoism. Highly recommended for both practical and philosophical reasons!

Esteve Morera, author of Gramscis Historicism and Gramsci, Materialism and Philosophy

First published by Zero Books, 2016

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Text copyright: J. Moufawad-Paul 2015

ISBN: 978 1 78535 476 2

978 1 78535 477 9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936941

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of J. Moufawad-Paul as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For comrades Gabrielle, Christophe, and Hamayon

Clearly, both continuity and rupture are part of the process of the evolution of every science, because this process of evolutionof every phenomenon in the natural realm, society and human thoughtis informed by the unity of opposites. Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan

Whence a revolution in Marxism, the Maoist revolution.

Alain Badiou

Abbreviations

CmPA = Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan

CPI (Maoist) = Communist Party of India (Maoist)

CPI (ML) = Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)

CPI (ML) Naxalbari = Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Naxalbari

CPI (ML) PWG = Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Peoples War Group

CPN (Maoist) = Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

CPP = Communist Party of the Philippines

CWG (Marxist-Leninist) = Communist Workers Group (Marxist-Leninist)

GPCR = Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

MCC = Maoist Communist Centre

MIM = Maoist Internationalist Movement

MKP = Maoist Communist Party of Turkey

nPCI = The New Communist Party of Italy

PCI (Maoist) = Communist Party of Italy (Maoist)

PCMF = Maoist Communist Party of France

PCP = Communist Party of Peru

PCR-RCP = Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada

PPW = protracted peoples war

RCP-USA = Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

RIM = Revolutionary Internationalist Movement

RU = Revolutionary Union

TKP/ML = Communist Party of Turkey Marxist-Leninist

WCP = Workers Communist Party of Canada

Prologue
Maoism and Philosophy

Before 1988 Maoism did not exist. I begin with this counter-intuitive statement in order to clarify the particular theoretical position that is the concern of this book. In The Communist Necessity, the polemical prolegomena to this book, I argued that there needed to be a new return to the concept of the revolutionary partya reclaiming of the theoretical tradition marked by world-historical revolutionsand that this new return was to be found in the three-headed beast of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Unfortunately some of my critics, unaware that The Communist Necessity was primarily a polemical introduction to a philosophical intervention that still needed to be written, made the mistake of conflating my demand for a new return with the very old return that I warned about: they assumed that, by arguing for a Maoist party of the new type, I was arguing for an unqualified and uncritical return to the partybuilding experiments, and actually-existing socialisms, that had reached their limits in the mid-20th-century. In point of fact, and this is one of my main claims, Maoism is not an old-fashioned Marxism but, unlike all of those demands to return to Marx (again fashionable following the crisis of 2008 and the onslaught of austerity), a modern theoretical terrain.

The moment one speaks of returning to the concept of a revolutionary communist party, and motivates this return with a reclamation of past categories of struggle (i.e. the vanguard, proletariat-bourgeoisie, revisionism and anti-revisionism, revolutionary science), every defense mechanism conditioned by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the supposed triumph of world capitalism is mobilized to inoculate the reader from ideological contamination. There is a common assumption that such a demand is orthodox despite the fact that a rejection of the party might also be orthodox: it is the orthodoxy of a movementist understanding of reality, the contemporary first-world lefts dogma, or even the orthodoxy of a return to a pre-Lenin Marx untainted by revolution. Then there is the rejection of applying the category of science to Marxism which is seen by some as old-fashioned but might be a misidentification with the general category of science with its natural and hard iterations. There is often scant investigation of what is meant by the employment of the categories of party and science or what theoretical constellation could be mobilized under the rubric of a new return.