Revolution Club Contingent in Pride Parade in NYC

TAKING THE REAL REVOLUTION TO PRIDE 2018

June 29, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Revolution Club NYC took its message—This System Cannot Be Reformed; It Must Be Overthrown—to the Pride March here. We went out with a big banner that said just that, with several thousand copies of HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution (HWCW), with Revolution—Nothing Less! t-shirts and with so many other materials that it was hard for the about half a dozen of us to transport it all to our gathering spot.

We were registered to be part of the Pride parade, and we got out there an hour before the contingent was supposed to step off in order to rally people to join us in taking the message of the revolution out to the many tens of thousands of people who came out to Pride 2018. And people did join us. Our banner and our chanting drew people to our presence. At times we did agitation that laid out what the revolution was all about and about the leadership we had for the revolution in Bob Avakian, and how HWCW laid out the strategy for revolution. A couple of groups of young people got t-shirts, and they and others held up and carried the banner (that took three people) and started getting out the flyers.

The revolution had an impact on the crowd before the parade stepped off. People signed up to be part of our contingent and march with us, and some people who were already signed up to march with other contingents decided to join ours instead. And when we stepped off, after several hours delay, we had a real impact on many of the people lining the parade route.

To be accurate here, most of the people paid little attention as we went past them, and a few reacted like we were intruding on their party. But a lot of people were drawn to our presence. People took pictures of our banner and videoed our agitation and chants. We did “This System Can’t Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown!” and “1, 2, 3, 4, Slavery, Genocide and War; 5, 6, 7, 8, America Was Never Great!”

We weren’t just marching down the street, we were rocking thru the parade. We gave our chants a rhythm. We had a beat and a presence, and many people rocked with us, taking up our chants and snatching up copies of HWCW and the flyer. Some of them joined our contingent, climbing over police barricades or jumping in as the parade stopped to let people cross the street. Some of the newer people gave our contingent a real vibrancy, dancing down the street carrying big posters of the “5 Stops.” At one point, the Refuse Fascism contingent in front of us took a knee, and we joined them in doing that. People in a religious contingent behind us joined in taking a knee.

All together two or three dozen people ended up joining our contingent at some point during the day, and at the end of the parade about 20 of us sat down for about 30 minutes to sum up what we had just done. About a dozen of the people involved in this summation had met the revolution for the first time that day. Those of us who had led the contingent posed whether people thought we had succeeded in taking out the message of the revolution to Pride, and we summed up what that message was.

Thru this brief summation, it became clear that people had been drawn to our contingent because they felt that the system couldn’t be reformed and needed to be overthrown, whatever their different understandings of what overthrowing it meant. (One person asked whether we thought buying some land and setting up communes where people could withdraw from capitalism was a viable strategy.) People mostly told us who they were, what their political experience had been; and they raised their questions about the revolution. And they also asked what was next, along with raising their ideas about what should be done and how they could be a part of doing it. (About a half-dozen of the new people were college students, and some of them wanted to bring the Revolution Club to their schools.) Basically people had taken part in the revolution, were discussing continuing to work with the revolution, and they were digging into what the revolution was all about.

Following this brief summation, a few of the new people and some of the revolutionaries had dinner together and continued the discussion.

 

This system can't be reformed, it must be overthrown!
Taking a knee at #Pride #NYCPride with @Carl_Dix @NYCRevClub https://t.co/yhgXETH0HY pic.twitter.com/nS7wc6UETq

— Sunsara Taylor (@SunsaraTaylor) June 25, 2018