Robert Avakian

• 1960s Berkeley radical
• “Chairman-in-exile” of the Revolutionary Communist Party
• Calls the U.S. a “worldwide oppressor”

Robert Avakian is a former Berkeley radical and the current "chairman-in-exile" of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist vanguard organization.

Born in Washington, DC and raised in Berkeley, California, Avakian attended UC Berkeley where he became enamored of the radical politics of the 1960s counter-culture. He became an activist in the Free Speech Movement, a supporter of the Black Panther Party, and a spokesman for the California-based Peace and Freedom Party, known for its socialist politics. After that, he joined Students for a Democratic Society, a faction of which later grew into the Weather Underground. Avakian then went on to become a prominent figure in the Revolutionary Youth Movement II, a Maoist group that opposed the militancy of the Weather Underground, instead advocating the formation of a new vanguard, the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, which in 1975 became officially known as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Carl Dix, C. Clark Kissinger, and Avakian were all instrumental in this process.

As a result of criminal indictments issued against him and several other RCP leaders in 1981 for their illegal entry onto White House grounds during a presidential ceremony, Avakian and his cohorts fled to Paris where they have been living "in exile" ever since. Despite being situated thousands of miles from the American mainland, Avakian continues to agitate for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, embracing the concept of an intellectual vanguard leading the proletariat in glorious revolution. “It is easy," says Avakian, "to look at the difficulties that such a world-historic revolution involves -- up against thousands of years of tradition’s chains as well as the military might of the guardians of the old order, above all the rulers of imperial America itself -- and decide to settle for something less … But, as Mao himself put it, speaking of the ascent to communism worldwide, ‘the road is tortuous, but the future is bright.’”

In an interview that appeared in the Revolutionary Worker on June 16, 2002, Avakian predicted that the U.S. would invade Iraq not because of any legitimate national security concerns but rather because of pride and arrogance: "You can't leave somebody standing who stood up to you, even to the degree that Saddam Hussein did at the time of the Gulf War when he refused to take their orders at that time -- not that Saddam Hussein is somebody that we would support or someone who represents the interests of the people, but he's someone who, compared to the monsters that they [the U.S. imperialists] are, is a pittance, is a small-time oppressor, compared to the worldwide oppressors that they are.”

Avakian has published a number of books on his Marxist philosophy, including: From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist (2005); Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics (2005); Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones: We Need Morality but Not Traditional Morality (1999); Phony Communism Is Dead, Long Live Real Communism (1992); Reflections, Sketches, and Provocations: Essays and Commentary, 1981-1987 (1990); Liberation without Gods (1988); DEMOCRACY: Can't We Do Better Than That? Radical and Socialist Reinterpretations of Democracy (1986); Bullets: From the Writings, Speeches, and Interviews of Bob Avakian (1985); A Horrible End: Or, An End to the Horror (1984); For a Harvest of Dragons: On the "Crisis of Marxism" and the Power of Marxism (1983); and Bob Avakian Speaks on the Mao Tsetung Defendants Railroad and the Historic Battles Ahead (1981).

In 2004 Avakian released a four-disc DVD set titled Revolution -- Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, which contains the recording of a speech he presented the previous year at an undisclosed location. Three Q Productions, the company selling the DVD, states that Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party is “seriously setting its sight on the seizure of power right within the U.S. itself … as part of the world proletarian revolution.”