THE NEW COMMUNISM by Bob Avakian Launched at a Great Program in Harlem

October 13, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On October 8, Bob Avakian’s pathbreaking new book THE NEW COMMUNISM was launched into the world. Over 260 people came out to the historic center for Black culture in Harlem, the Schomburg Library, to hear Cornel West, Carl Dix and Andy Zee, along with others, welcome this book into the world. By the end of the event, very few people had left; and those who remained had gotten into something very special and, for many, very new.

Communism—Today

People sat rapt as Sunsara Taylor and Noche Diaz read excerpts from the new work. The readings—which can be seen with the entirety of the program on the Livestream presentation—covered different parts of the book, bringing out both the scope and the scientific breakthrough of BA’s work and leadership, as well as his humanity, his integrity, his sense of humor, and his feeling for the people.

Carl Dix gave a passionate talk on the new book and Bob Avakian himself. He gave the audience a sense of BA’s work over the decades—the content of that work (as concentrated in THE NEW COMMUNISM), and what motivated him to do that work. He spoke movingly of the connection between BA and the masses, especially those on the bottom of society, and he went into the courageous character of his leadership. He traced the outlines of how the new synthesis came out of a decades-long interrogation of reality. “The core of the scientific understanding of how to make revolution and emancipate humanity developed by Marx, Lenin, and Mao is continued in what BA has developed, but he has identified and broken with some secondary but significant unscientific aspects that had been in communism as it had previously been understood, and that were holding it back,” Dix said. “As our Party has said, to be a communist today means to be a follower of BA. This is a very big deal—the science of human emancipation has been rescued and advanced to a new level—and we should appreciate what a big deal that is.” Dix went deeply into the work that BA has done on leadership, and the way in which that leadership is both absolutely necessary and bound up with contradictions—the subject of Part IV of THE NEW COMMUNISM. He gave this a personal dimension as well, as he went into BA’s launching of the Cultural Revolution within the RCP to rupture it back onto the revolutionary road.

Integrity, Commitment, and Analysis

Cornel West, coming from his point of view as a revolutionary Christian, spoke on the integrity and importance of BA’s leadership and its relation to the whole “profound commitment [of Black people] to trying to understand this capitalist civilization in profound decay and pervasive decline.”

West went on: “What I love about this particular text is three things. One, there is a revolutionary integrity. And we live in a capitalist civilization across race, across class, across sexual orientation, across national boundaries, in which everything is for sale and everybody is for sale…” He spoke of the revolutionary internationalism that grounds the whole work. And he concluded on the “5 Stops”:

And in his analysis—and then I’ll sit down—five different stops that he has. I love this section of this text. I love it when he talks about my people being all people. I learned that in Sunday school, he learned it in the communist party, but that’s alright. My people across the board—I don’t care who they are. But the five stops—he always puts the struggle against white supremacy at the center. That’s not true for most American leftists, it’s certainly even not true for most American socialists. Second, the centrality of the issue of gender, the vicious forms of patriarchy inseparable from that white supremacy. Third, empire—invasions, dominations… And the fourth, the planet—not just global warming. It’s ecological catastrophe that is impinging every day primarily owing to corporate greed and the elites who are in the driver’s seat of a capitalist civilization that cuts across national boundaries—that’s what you find in this text. And last but not least, the concern about our precious immigrant brothers and sisters and the vicious scapegoating that’s going on, the deportations under neo-liberal presidents, no matter what color they are. The attempt to [not] lose sight of their humanity. How do you bring these together in such a way that you have a united front? And that’s in part what he’s calling for, and I as a revolutionary Christian in the name of Jesus will be part of that united front, even given the disagreements that we might have. That’s why I like this text. That’s why it’s important.

Annie Day spoke on the work of The Bob Avakian Institute, which is dedicated to preserving, projecting, and promoting the works and vision of Bob Avakian, with the aim of reaching the broadest possible audience. She set forth a vision of a very dynamic period coming off the publication of THE NEW COMMUNISM, and she gave the audience “three assignments” coming out of this program: to donate funds to get the word of THE NEW COMMUNISM way out into society, including in a program to subsidize those who live lives on the desperate edge; to bring speakers from The Bob Avakian Institute to schools, religious groups, community organizations, book clubs, unions, etc.; and to themselves get into this work, including by coming to discussions of the work.

This was followed by a deeply joined conversation between Carl and Cornel, which was moderated by Andy Zee of Revolution Books in Harlem (which, along with The Bob Avakian Institute and Insight Press, co-sponsored the celebration). They focused in particular on morality and leadership—including getting into BA’s discussion in the book of the Cultural Revolution within the RCP that Avakian leads.

Find out more about the revolution         Find out about BA, the leader of the revolution

Will You Be Here?

Andy Zee sent the audience home. He said:

We began this afternoon with a question and answer that was posed by Bob Avakian in the introduction to THE NEW COMMUNISM. This was a question that was raised to the revolutionaries in Baltimore in the wake of the righteous rising after the police murder of Freddie Grey. People asked revolutionaries, “Will you be here? We’ve seen a lot of groups come and go and a lot of talk, but will you be here?” And he told of a woman from the same streets, who said, “I’m worried because I’m beginning to hope.” BA answered that: If we don’t answer this with the determination to follow through and the responsibility to be there, not only for that one woman and certainly not for ourselves alone, but for the emancipation of humanity—then “we should get up and leave.” But you all are still here, late on this Saturday afternoon. And so are we.

This is a bigger responsibility than one afternoon, even as this afternoon should be a first step into becoming an emancipator of humanity—or your first step in learning why the world is the horror that it is, learning to be scientific, learning to confront reality as it actually is, learning to go for the truth, to be able to cut to the root of why there is so much suffering in this world and why it is at this point in the history that all these outrages the world faces are so damn unnecessary.

Digging into the why and the how the world could be radically transformed through an actual revolution so that all of humanity can live and flourish in a world where people are no longer divided into rich and poor, masters and slaves, rulers and ruled. No longer fighting and slaughtering each other, but working together for the common good. No longer locked in ignorance, but consciously understanding and changing the world. And no longer destroying the earth but acting as its caretakers.

This is possible. The roadmap, the science, the framework, for how to know and change the world and the contradictions that humanity will have to traverse to get free and how to traverse them—are now in your hands if you dig into this book. And get into BA and get with the party and the movement for revolution he leads. Will you be there? [Someone from the audience shouts: Yeah!]

The program was followed by an extremely lively session out in the lobby, with people going back and forth over the questions and issues raised by the program, many getting connected with organizations that are key to the movement for revolution. Eighty copies of the book were sold and many more people left determined to get one. Then, though the event had run for more than three hours, somewhere between 70 and 100 people wanted to discuss things still more, and gathered for an impromptu question/answer with Carl, Cornel and Andy at Revolution Books, which ran to 6:30 p.m. (and then itself was followed by even more wrangling).

What came through in all of this was the potential power of BA’s new synthesis of communism to transform people, and through revolution, the world. As Ardea Skybreak says in her book-length Interview Science and Revolution, discussing the difference that this vision can begin to make as it gets out into all of society, engaged and taken up: “We’ve seen it before, we’ve seen it in previous periods of revolutionary upsurge. The people get better. The people get smarter. The people get more lofty. They dream bigger, and they act in accordance with these bigger dreams. It’s a beautiful sight. And that’s a lot of what BA is actually giving us the tools to accomplish.”

 

 

 

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