First Experience with Getting Out HOW WE CAN WIN: “This is about humanity in the planet getting free”

August 29, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The following is from a reader sharing their first outing getting out HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution:

Today there was a counter-protest against a “Blue Lives Matter rally,” and Refuse Fascism was taking part in that. This was mainly led by a coalition of leftist, socialist, anarchist, etc. collectives and Refuse Fascism had been asked to endorse just a couple days before. We didn’t really get to plan this task of getting out HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution (HWCW) due to constraints, but I have been paying attention to the experience and reports of others on the website (particularly "What It Means to Really WIELD HOW WE CAN WIN"). I went into this thinking that some kind of “jolt,” some kind of clash between opposing futures, would be the best moment to get this out in a mass way the most effectively.

At one point, there was a confrontation between the pigs and counter-protestors and it turned very violent, very quickly. It just so happened that we were outside of a church in Center City, one that has a long progressive history, but these people were actually there for a funeral. It was mainly a family affair, but a few other people were waiting at the bus stop in the same spot.

They were puzzled as to what was going on in front of them, and nobody was talking to them, so I figured this was the best moment to seize upon. I walked over and started agitating about how protesters were righteously standing up against police brutality and white supremacy, and just like the pigs they are, they cracked down on the people who were standing up for a better world. This sparked some real anger in the crowd towards the police and they were getting vocal, cursing while recording them. They were narrating what was going down to their cameras, with one taking note to her viewers about how they don’t do just this to Black people. I started to let people know that there was an actual political and military strategy to defeat these repressive forces of this system and bring a better system into place right here in my hand, developed by the Revolutionary Communist Party. I had to clarify several times that this protest wasn’t led by the RCP and that wasn’t what was going on right now. I told people about how there is finally the strategy for a way out of this for real, and that we don’t have to accept living in a world where the people are “encircled and brutalized” like they were seeing now. People were still kind of just watching and frozen in place for a bit.

So I asked, “Is there anyone here who doesn’t want to live under this system anymore?” Silence...

“Is there ANYONE here who refuses to accept a world like this and wants out?” Silence...

“You can’t tell me that NOBODY here wants to get free! Someone! Where are you?”

A man pushes through the crowd and says he’ll take a copy. Two women follow suit shortly, one after being motioned by her son to do so. I got lost in the moment and just started getting them into outstretched hands. It wasn’t a whole lot, but close to10 since I didn’t have a huge stack in my hand. People starting reading it right away, and I could overhear people talking about how sick they were of this police violence shit repeatedly.

It looked like things were moving on, so I went back over to the counter-protest. Everything got split up as some counter-protesters went off in a different direction. I was able to get some out to Refuse Fascism volunteers that had not heard about it, agitating on similar points and directly reading from Part 2 at one point about how we need to “encircle them.”

This is also an area where a lot of homeless people gather and hang out. They had been watching everything go down and then actually tried to call us out for not fighting the cops ourselves (and he was talking to Refuse Fascism). One guy was just going on and on, I was going to let him say his piece but he wasn’t trying to hear anything back. He really didn’t know shit about us or what was going on here, and I was about to read from HWCW right there to shut the infantile bullshit and fighting on unfavorable terms he was trying to push us towards. It was hard for me to take this, not because he was heart-checking me or belittling my intelligence, but because people in these conditions need to dig into this and wield it too and not being caught up in losing strategies, and how we need to fight for this to be seen as the leading authority. However this wasn’t the only thing I had to do today, and I was being pulled away by others who did not wish to entertain them.

A lot can and should be said about how to do this more scientifically, in a more living and refined way. I look forward to struggling and being struggled with. This is all bigger than me. This is about humanity in the planet getting free, wiping the system of capitalism-imperialism off the earth and entering a communist epoch. I am just so personally fulfilled to have been part of taking this out to people straight-up and inviting them to be a part of this movement to end all exploitation and oppression, including with all the bullshit and danger that comes with this. Several times I thought of how people in other areas are doing this too, in other parts of the world, and I was filled with a greater, solemn sense of urgency and excitement.