Revolution #266, April 22, 2012
Scenes from BA Everywhere
Week of April 16
“Scenes from BA Everywhere” is a weekly feature that gives our readers an ongoing picture of this multifaceted campaign, and the variety of ways that funds are being raised and the whole BA vision and framework is being brought into all corners of society. Revolution newspaper is at the hub of the BA Everywhere effort—publishing reports from those taking up the campaign. Revolution plays a pivotal role in building an organized network of people across the country coming together to make BA a household word. We urge all our readers to send us timely correspondence on what you are doing as part of this campaign.
BA Everywhere in Rainy Harlem
It was a cold and wet Saturday in New York, but in a few hours people in Harlem donated $321.57 for the BAsics Bus Tour. On the subways, at a street corner, in shops, people stopped to listen and dig in their pockets for ones and twos, or a five or ten, and a barber pledged $100. He and some of the other contributors regularly read Revolution newspaper and have BAsics. He said he had been following the reports of the initial run of the BAsics Bus Tour in California, and when the team wondered what it might look like if “100 barbers donated $100,” he said it didn’t necessarily have to be a barber, it could be raised in a shop. He also said that he really liked the BAsics Bus Tour graphic that has the highway running through it...
A Dominican shop owner spoke about how Dominicans are treated a lot like Black people and do not know about BA. The BA Everywhere team read BA’s “no more generations” quote and the shop owner wound up donating and getting Revolution. At another shop, a person from Mexico heard the team read from the last lines of the RCP Statement on the Murder of Trayvon Martin and, while another person asked how the Trayvon Martin killing connected with communism, the person from Mexico said that he had read about the California BAsics Bus Tour, that it had stopped in Fresno with all of the immigrants and others there, and he then made a small donation and got a copy of Revolution. Another person in the shop got two copies of the paper and pledged to donate to the tour and to get BAsics. Several people who contributed funds for the tour got the “Three Strikes” poster. One person who did explained to his friend: “These people really have it together.” A young woman just moving into the projects and doing the laundry contributed to the fund and got a paper, saying that she was “looking forward to a place where there was resistance.”
The teams also distributed hundreds of the RCP Statement on the Murder of Trayvon Martin and sold virtually all of the Revolution newspapers they had. They reported that it was important to briefly make it very clear and sharp to all that this was a national fundraising campaign to raise money for the national BAsics Bus Tour, and then to step directly to people and ask them to donate, and when someone did, others did also. The BA Everywhere team members were cold, but jazzed, by what happened and by the potential for much more.
Sunsara Taylor at Seattle Revolution Books
From a Revolution Books staff member:
Sunsara Taylor spoke at Revolution Books in a program titled “From the Expanding Porn Industry to the Aggressive Religious Patriarchs: End the Enslavement & Degradation of Women.” While we primarily raised money for the campaign to end pornography and patriarchy, we also wanted to give people at the program an opportunity to donate to get BA Everywhere. The fund pitch was simple and brief, but it laid out the needs of both and let a number of people who’d never encountered this movement for revolution know that we’re out to get BA’s voice and vision everywhere and how that could change what people are talking about and doing with regard to the liberation of women and everything else. We read the BAsics 4:13 quote, “There is not one human nature...” This question was definitely “in the room.” One person decided to donate $10 to the End Pornography and Patriarchy Campaign and $20 to BA Everywhere. We encourage other bookstores to raise money for BA Everywhere even when raising money for other pressing needs of the movement for revolution. There’s no need to pit the needs against each other when the relationship with BA Everywhere strengthens all we are doing.
Socialism vs. Capitalism Debated at Brown University
In a nearly-packed lecture hall at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, some 160 people came out on March 21 to hear a debate between Raymond Lotta and Glenn Loury. The topic was “Socialism vs. Capitalism: The Way Forward in the 21st Century.” The event was sponsored by the Janus Forum. Glenn Loury is a professor of economics at Brown. An ardent advocate of free-market economics, Loury is also an outspoken critic of the mass incarceration of Black and Latino youth. Raymond Lotta articulated Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism and talked about how the new synthesis is embodied in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal).
The video of the debate can be viewed at revcom.us or at Brown University’s Political Theory Project site. Also see reader correspondence about building for this debate on the campus, at revcom.us.
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