Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed on the Avakian ad:
In the weeks since it appeared, a few friends who knew of my longstanding fascination with the Chairman Bob phenomenon asked about the New York Review ad. They were surprised to see it, and wondered whether all these people had actually taken up the cause of Avakianism.
My best guess, rather, was that very few of the signatories had read much Avakian. The abundance and verbosity of his pamphlets would exceed the stamina of any but the most disciplined of revolutionary intellectuals. What probably happened, I surmised, was that party cadres had pointed out various anti-Bush statements by Avakian in order to harvest a bunch of signatures from people who were angered by the course of recent history.
At the same time, it was easy to imagine how other people would probably understand the ad. They would look at it and conclude that the signatories were, in fact, hardcore militants looking to Avakian for leadership in establishing a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
The belief that academia contains literally tens of thousands of such people has, of course, no basis in reality. But it is evidently quite profitable. There is an audience for such claims (the rate of propagation of suckers-per-minute having intensified since P.T. Barnum’s day) and it constitutes a more robust market than the one for Marxist-Leninist pamphlets. One pictures right-wing interns stuffing envelopes with reprinted copies of the NYRB advertisement and sending it to the hinterlands – and humming “We’re in the Money” all the while.