Videos and Pictures from Revolutionary Summer Solstice, June 20-21

Updated June 29, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On the weekend of June 20-21, people in cities across the country kicked off the summer by taking revolution and Bob Avakian, BA, to the people in an atmosphere of charged political ferment, and questioning. (See the call for Revolutionary Summer Solstice here.) Here are two videos—one of Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the other of Andy Zee of Revolution Books in NYC—and scenes from the weekend in some of the cities.

The following is an excerpt from remarks by the MC at the June 21 Revolutionary Summer! Picnic and Talent Show in New York City, as part of the Revolutionary Summer Solstice weekend.

It seems like it’s a time that’s very important right now in the world. And how we’re thinking and what we’re doing is very important. It really matters because we can keep going in one direction—which as we’ve seen, and we keep seeing, for the masses of people is really horrible, and just an absolute horror. I mean, you can see this, just this poster [pointing to the revcom.us Stolen Lives poster with the faces and names of dozens of people murdered by police], which has been out in a lot of marches and stuff. And all these faces, these human beings, their lives taken away from them... Domestic violence. People’s lives being stolen by cops. And lives crushed and dreams crushed by capitalism. And people are thinking about this... Thinking about how do we end this. I see a lot of it on social media. I’m sure most of us do. And yesterday, a friend of mine posted a poster, I guess from the ’60s, with a fist. It was a red poster with a black fist. And there was an address and a phone number at the bottom of the poster, for contacting Fred Hampton.* And she wrote: “Where are our leaders?” Well, we have that leadership. We have a leader that not only has immense compassion for human beings. Uncompromising compassion. Who actually has dedicated his life to studying what Carl Dix was talking about—what’s happening in the world, what are the root causes of this, and how do we get to solving these problems. That leader is Bob Avakian. And we really need more and more people to delve into this work, spread it—so we can stop fighting the good fight, remaining in this system, and actually get out of it to something better.

* Fred Hampton was the leader of the Black Panther Party in Illinois, who was assassinated in 1969 by Chicago police in a FBI COINTELPRO operation. [back]