Revolution #151, December 28, 2008
Interview on Fundraising Among Professors:
Welcoming the Tough Questions
The following are excerpts from an interview with someone who has been talking to professors about donating money and financially sustaining Revolution Books and Revolution newspaper.
In going out to professors to raise money for Revolution Books and Revolution newspaper, our approach was from the point of view of the Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist Party—talking about what the communist revolution is about and in this context what this bookstore and this newspaper are all about. And we said right up front that we need a bookstore and a newspaper like this if we are going to make revolution—and that right now, we need $60,000 straight up front and by March we also need $6,500 a month on an ongoing basis.
I met with a woman professor who has been reading Revolution for seven years. We talked for just 10 minutes and I realize now that you can accomplish a lot in 10 minutes. First of all, I talked to her about Revolution moving the center of its work to New York. And I decided to get right away into one of the big questions she has. She is someone who, when you talk about the criminalization of a generation, her view is that most of these people should stay in prison. I put it right to her, that it is wrong to be blaming the youth and not the system. She’s against the war and sees that it is the imperialists who are behind it. She doesn’t like the whole direction of the Christian fascists and the whole direction that Bush has taken the country. She supported Obama and now has second thoughts given his choices for the Cabinet. But she sees all the violence among the youth, what the people do to each other and she doesn’t understand that this is the system at work.
I read her a letter from a prisoner who talks about how he has been reading Revolution for five years and how important it is to him and this had a big impact on her. She said, “Can you promise me that when the oppressed rise up (even though I don’t think that’s going to happen, at least in my lifetime) that they won’t come after me?” I answered by saying that the kind of revolution we’re talking about is not one based on revenge, where “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” We talked about what happened in China. And we talked about the kind of revolution we need. At the end of this discussion she said she would write a check for $500.
A key thing here was that we talked about the specific needs of the newspaper. And we also said to her that we’re enlisting you in this effort and you need to be part of this revolutionary movement. And if you want to make a substantial difference, not a token difference, then you need to be part of this and you need to tell others about this and you need to come up with the kind of money that is really commensurate with what the needs are. And she did.
We also went to another professor who does a lot of traveling and works with various foundations. He has given money in the past, one or two hundred here and there and at first I was thinking of asking him for $500. Then I decided that’s wrong, we should ask him for $2,000 and to sustain at $500 a month because while he has a lot of disagreements with and questions about what we’re doing, he really, really likes the future we’re fighting for—he wants to see a world without inequality, he wants to see a world without exploitation and oppression. He’s been to various Third World countries and he’s seen what this system has done to people all over the world and he wants to make things better. He’s an irregular reader of the paper but he’s read the Draft Programme of the party, he’s attracted to our all-the-way-revolution vision of a new world and he has some understanding of this—from the writings of Bob Avakian, what he’s read in the paper and through conversations. When we put it to him like this, he said, “I can’t give you $2,000 but I’m going to give $1,000 to the store.” And now he’s considering becoming a sustainer at between $200 and $400 a month.
We have known some of these people for many years, others are very new to us. But I think there is a reason people were willing to meet with us to talk about fundraising. They understand the seriousness of what we are putting before them. We are asking them to, together with us, take responsibility for the future of humanity. We put forth to them that where we’re coming from is the need for a socialist revolution and a communist world, that this is the hope of humanity and we have a plan to get there. And it is important that people see that, with all their questions and disagreements, they can count on us to listen and discuss these questions and disagreements with them. Some of them now concretely see the need to support particular initiatives like around the newspaper and the bookstore. And they see that this revolutionary movement is going somewhere good and it will actually make a difference what it does. I have to say that this has been a learning experience for me because I really didn’t grasp what it means to build these kind of relationships with people and now I have a better understanding of that. This is about fundraising—and fundamentally fundraising is about incorporating people into meaningful revolutionary work. These professors now have a relationship with this newspaper and with this bookstore and with the revolutionary movement.
This one professor said that he feels humanity is not ready for our message—of revolution and communism. He said: “I share your vision of a world community, respectful of everyone’s differences and meeting the material requirements of people and their intellectual needs as well—that’s why I teach. I am a Kantian. I try to live by his moral imperative. Teaching this principle is my way of helping make that happen.” Then he said, “I’ve been watching you guys for a while and you finally learned how to listen. You guys are putting forward the message of revolution, and while I disagree with that I can’t fault you for that. It’s clear you want others to get involved in this who do disagree. That wasn’t always the case.” Speaking of two of his colleagues, he said: “The fact that you have these two guys’ ear —one who is into Freud and the other who is into Rawls—tells me that you are widening your reach, you are not just speaking to the choir.” He gave a donation of $100 and is sustaining the bookstore now at $100 a month.
Now a number of these professors are also taking responsibility in different ways to develop the work of the bookstore and the newspaper. Some want to write correspondence to the newspaper and some of these professors are strategizing with the bookstore around how to reach out to other professors, including getting them to order course books through Revolution Books. And there are about six professors who have been enlisted to help build the bookstore’s stock on various topics that they have some expertise on.
Many professors really care about the next generation—this is a big reason they went into teaching. A number of them have had us speak in their classrooms, some have brought students to the store and some assigned (or gave extra credit to) students to attend the October 26 program on Making Revolution in the USA. We spoke to students in 17 classes about making communist revolution in the United States and the professors were very jazzed by the students’ positive response.
Some of these professors wouldn’t talk to us before, they just looked at us as the sales people for the bookstore—just bring me my books and go away. I went to this one professor, went into his office and closed the door and said I want to talk to you about this newspaper and this bookstore, give me a minute. And he said, why would I be interested in this? And I said because you want to change the world and so do we. And we ended up talking for 45 minutes and we got into his questions about things. Now he’s one of the people who’s going to help us build the Spanish section of the bookstore. We need to get out of this stereotypical way of thinking about where people are at. We need to go to them and talk, listen and struggle over things. The way I put it to one professor was: You care about humanity and this bookstore and this newspaper cares about humanity and we have to talk and work together to get rid of this horrible system.
And in terms of asking for financial support—let’s put it this way, when you bring up money upfront, which I do, you will hear people’s disagreements and questions much sooner. What about this, what do you think about that? And then what do you do? Do you sidetrack the questions that are tough, or do you really go for those? You have to go for the tough questions. You can and need to unite around different things. But if you sidetrack their questions, whether it be around reforming the system, Jeffersonian democracy, the experience of socialism, etc.—we know these questions are there and we have to welcome this. We have to take all comers because that’s how you’re going to actually get people to engage with the questions of the revolution, that’s how we’re going to learn from people, that’s how we’re going to unite with people and enlist them in the revolutionary movement.
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