Avakian’s Assessment of Thomas Jefferson:
A Critical Reading
By Pavel Andreyev
Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the RCPand other Maoist organizations.
The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society” and is promoting it with the same urgency it devoted to the author’s Away With All Gods!earlier this year… What follows is a contribution to a critique, addressing approximately the first quarter of the work (dealing with Jefferson, his life and thought) rather than a review of the entirety. I’ll raise some questions about how we should relate to historical facts, the issue of “progress” or “directionality” in history, and the evaluation of individuals in historical periods far removed from us. In AWAG!Avakian remarks provocatively that if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t and shouldn’t like him very much (mainly because he accepted slavery). Similarly he would like us to dislike Thomas Jefferson, whom he depicts as a cynical, demagogic, slave-owning oppressor. But his depiction of the individual (whatever its own merits) is less the issue than the use of this depiction to broadly characterize and explain over two centuries of “Jeffersonian democracy.”
Web version: part 1, part 2, part 3
Related posts:
Nick Paretsky on 
John Steele on 
Politics & Evil Part 3: Engaging Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism « Kasama on 
Don Hamerquist on 
worker antagonism on 
