Ned Isakoff

April 1^st, 2025 GATT special online-only issue

With its perceived danger of the consolidation of fascism under a second Trump administration in mind, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) has announced a radical change in its class analysis from its 2001 Draft Programme (the last time the RCP did class analysis). It no longer believes the proletariat, and its lower and deeper sections in particular, to be the social base for revolution in the US. Instead, the RCP has identified the liberal petty-bourgeoisie to be the most revolutionary class in society.

This change in the RCP’s class analysis is guided by the intellectual breakthroughs of its Chair, Bob Avakian. Avakian’s epistemological breakthrough had already superseded Mao’s mass line, and now his method of class analysis has made Lenin’s approach obsolete. In opposition to Lenin’s economist method of analyzing class in relation to the means of production, Avakian insists that a more scientific approach is to analyze class in relation to level of vaccination for COVID-19, which indicates how much one stands for the emancipation of humanity and has a scientific approach to reality. Hence the liberal petty-bourgeoisie, the class that was quickest to line up for COVID jabs and most consistent with getting booster shots, and also most performative in their mask wearing, is the most revolutionary class in society. The lower and deeper sections of the proletariat, on the other hand, who sometimes were too busy working to get vaccines, have often been too lazy to get their boosters, and among whom some believe in COVID conspiracy theories, has become more or less a reactionary class. The RCP provided no justification for why they think the pharmaceutical companies producing COVID vaccines or the US government agencies approving them are a great model of scientific practice rather than profit-making.

Avakian’s new method for identifying the revolutionary class in society finally provides a theoretical answer to longstanding criticisms from many people who quit the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade in frustration that the center of gravity of the RCP’s work shifted increasingly towards the liberal petty-bourgeoisie and away from the masses. In a forthcoming summation from the RCP—the first summation they have written of their work in decades—they will justify, as a correction of economist errors, the trajectory from the hippy-dippy appeal of the Not In Our Name initiative in the early 2000s; to the obsession with progressive Democrats and elite college students during the World Can’t Wait days; to focusing on mass incarceration for a brief period after Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow got popular with the liberal petty-bourgeoisie and then moving on when the trend died (but two million proletarians were still locked up); to the failed attempt to tail after the brief-lived protest movement at the beginning of Trump’s first term via Refuse Fascism; to Avakian’s call for people to vote for Biden in 2020 (sorry, “against Trump,” but not for third party candidates…meaning for Biden) because that election was truly different than all others; to today’s uncritical praise for any liberal protests of Trump’s policies and advocacy for nonviolence. (Don’t worry, long, “mouthful” sentences like that one exemplify dialectics, and are indicative of how Avakian’s new communism also applies to sentence construction.)

Upon publication of this summation, titled “Against economism and for humanity, and the social-pacifist methods of struggle humanity needs to stop fascism,” the two remaining Revolution Books locations will invite the public to book burning parties, at which remaining copies of Avakian’s Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That? will be torched, as they are out of sync with Avakian’s new communism. The keynote address at both book burnings will be given by sycophant Andy Zee, host of the Revolution Nothing Less YouTube show. In contrast to the consternation of many longtime RCP members and supporters, Zee was ecstatic about the RCP’s new class analysis purporting the liberal petty-bourgeoisie to be the most revolutionary class in society, explaining “them’s my people” while perusing an issue of The New Yorker. The revolutionary band Outernational will be performing at both events, featuring out of key singing by a lead vocalist who looks like an AI-generated image of a 1990s Lower East Side New York hipster. In addition to his 1986 book Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?, Avakian will also be retracting his previous internal polemics against self-cultivation among RCP members and supporters.