Revolution #261, February 26, 2012
Report from Riders on the BAsics Bus Tour
The BAsics Bus Tour (pilot project) rolled out of L.A. a week-and-a-half ago. From Watts and Pico Union in L.A., we drove to some of the further reaches of Southern California—places where the movement for revolution and Bob Avakian's vision and works do not consistently reach or do not reach at all. The Bus Tour, with its eye-catching decorations, is spreading revolution and BA's voice to those hungry for it in these outlying areas. We are speaking in classrooms, engaging with those in the Occupy movement, and going into the inner cities and having dinner with the Unitarians at their church. We are setting up big displays in university quads and at swap meets. Our message: "You can't change the world if you don't know the BAsics." "Get into BA!" As we write, we are now in Northern California and have spent two days at UC Davis, notorious internationally for the cop who brutally and casually pepper-sprayed occupying students who were sitting on the ground and not moving.
What follows are some "snapshots":
Orange County
Orange County has been the iconic bastion of conservatism for the last half century. It is the home of Disneyland and the infamous fundamentalist Saddleback Church. But over the past two decades, this conservative stronghold has changed as large numbers of immigrants have moved there. There is also a rebellious section of white youth and a punk culture.
While Orange County is now more than 30 percent Latino, Black residents are less than two percent of the population. DWB (Driving While Black) stops are epidemic. A Black man walking to his SUV had just been shot dead by sheriff's deputies near San Clemente High School. Manuel Levi Loggins, a Marine, had been on his daily early morning "prayer walk" with his children before school. One media report said that his Bible was found soaked with his blood.
Orange County Market Place
On Sunday we drove our bus to the Orange County Market Place, set up our displays and looked around. We saw lots of red, white and blue, including a Republican Party booth with a sign—"Yes to freedom, no to socialism. Register to vote here." Our booth, with the BAsics bus as our backdrop, drew many stares and double-takes. Some people hated it. "Communism is for ants. I like my freedom and free will: I'm not living in an ant colony," a white man in his 30s yelled. Another white guy, on hearing the first two quotes from BAsics on slavery, got angry and said he was "tired of feeling guilty." A Latina saw us and intoned, "The end times are coming. We don't need a revolution. Everything is in God's hands. It is all settled." We responded, "The notion of a god, or gods, was created by humanity, in its infancy, out of ignorance." (BAsics 4:17)
Others were more open, and some loved that we had come. A young Latino who had seen us roll by his house that morning bought BAsics and was excited to actually meet us. A Latina who bought the book after reading the quote, "Why do people come here..." (BAsics 1:14) said she never gets to hear people talking about these things. An immigrant who had attended the World Social Forum asked us, "What do you think of Marx, Noam Chomsky, Fidel, Chavez?" He bought the Revolution talk DVD, Revoluton: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, to check out BA. Many people stopped to read the poster with BA's Three Strikes quote.1 Two of those who read the poster bought the book.
Anaheim Unitarians
A Unitarian Church in Anaheim held an evening pizza dinner for the Bus Tour and contributed money and food for our tour. After dinner, people on the tour did a short program, telling people what the tour is about and calling for financial support, reading quotes from BAsics Chapter 2, "A Whole New—and Far Better—World" and performing the skit drawn from BA's "All Played Out" that the tour has been developing. A wild and stimulating discussion took off from there. People in the room, mostly people older than 50, were coming from many different places and pulling the discussion in a lot of directions at the same time. What about BAsics and the tour? Let's talk about revolution, socialism and communism. Communism has been so attacked and vilified... why do we even use the name "communist"? What about the latest protest in Anaheim? And the next step for the Occupy movement? And we discussed it all.
Lo BAsico book event in Santa Ana
Santa Ana, the county seat of Orange County, has the highest percentage of Spanish speakers of any city in the U.S. And Libreria Martinez Books & Art Gallery is (according to its website) the largest seller of books in Spanish in the U.S. About 15 people came to the reading there, including a group of high school youth. These students were excited to meet us and especially talked about "Let's imagine if we had a whole different art and culture...." (Lo BAsico 2:8) A man from Mexico City who had bought Lo BAsico in a nearby park that morning came to the reading. He had already read a lot of the book and commented on the sections that impressed him: about religion, seizing power, and learning about the experience of socialism. "These are big solutions to big problems." He said we needed to reach out more to youth, to the schools, that this book "has to be brought to people around the world."
University of California, Davis
A day or so before our arrival at Davis, news of the tour had already begun to spark some interest on campus. After hearing about the tour, one person helped to arrange a presentation at the campus bookstore and tried to find a way to get our fully decorated Bus Tour RV onto the campus itself. Calls to the campus radio station to talk about the tour inspired a number of DJs and others to send word of the tour out to their friends and other DJs, encouraging them to check it out and, if possible, cover it on their shows.
As we got closer to Davis, we called in to the campus radio station and got on the air on its Local Dirt environmental show. We read the BAsics 1:29 quote, "This system and those who rule over it ... care nothing for the rich diversity of the earth.... These people are not fit to be the caretakers of the earth." We talked about the Bus Tour and BAsics, and announced we would be on campus the next day. During our two days at UC Davis we posted quotes from BAsics in buildings and other high-traffic areas of the campus in the early mornings and then set up on the quad. People would see our table and the giant banner of the BAsics book cover. They wanted to know about the quotes, BAsics, and who Bob Avakian is.
Others were clearly very uncomfortable about us being there, including a woman from a pro-Israel campus group who was offended by a display which showed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians along with the BAsics 5:12 quote: "After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel."
Others, including a student with a gas mask hanging over her shoulder, liked what they saw and stopped to engage. Many have recently been awakened to politics through the pepper-spray incident. Some people who saw the quote about the role of police asked us if there would still be the need for police, what would be different about their role in the new socialist society? We showed them the Tyisha Miller quote (BAsics 2:16) which talks about how, when the proletariat has had power, and in a future socialist society, a people's police plays a fundamentally different role, and would sooner give their lives than "wantonly murder one of the masses."
A professor expressed big differences with what we were saying, then invited us to come to his class, where we had a 30-minute discussion about BAsics, answering questions on revolution, the historical socialist experience, and communism. We used quotes from BAsics in speaking to some of these questions. But we said that we were not going to try—and it was not possible—to answer all these questions in the limited time we had. The challenge was for them to engage with something very radical and radically different—get into BAsics and Bob Avakian.
A discussion with a radical student
Several times we had visited students who had been sitting-in at the bank on campus, blocking the entrance. But we hadn't had a substantive conversation, so we decided to stop back before we left to sit down and talk. A woman there asked, "So I noticed you guys roll pretty hard with Bob Avakian, right? Why Bob Avakian?" But before we could get started, her friend came and she had to go. Another young woman said dismissively, "Yeah, he's not really relevant to what's going on...." We asked her if she had engaged any of BA's works before and she said "no." So we challenged her that this is actually not right; she could not dismiss something in such a facile manner without having any idea what it was! We told her that there are things in the book that she doesn't know anything about and needed to seriously engage. She turned a little red and walked away, but this prompted her friend to come over and engage.
The discussion covered themes ranging from how to correctly assess the history of the previous socialist experience to how the masses become class conscious. And at some point through the back-and-forth, it became clear that we were not talking about the same thing. While the student kept using the word "revolution," what he was describing was not revolution but upheavals and rebellions. He mentioned Greece and Egypt and said the masses there did "all that" without a vanguard organization. In response, we read BAsics 6:2: "What kind of organization you see as necessary depends on what you're trying to do. If all you're trying to do is make a few reforms, if you're not trying to really confront and deal with this whole system, if you're not trying to make revolution and transform society and the world, then you don't need this kind of vanguard party."
Goggles
The first day at Davis a young woman ran up to us, very excited: "You're like Occupy except with direction and organization, right?" We talked with her and showed her BAsics. She sprinted to the ATM and back to buy the book. The next day she came to help out at the table, periodically calling to a passing student, "Hey, want to learn about revolution and communism?" We sat down on the grass to talk and she pulled out a red sweatshirt with a hammer and sickle symbol she had sewed onto it, and draped it over her lap.
She had been on the quad the day of the pepper-spray incident. "I had these goggles on, and I was there when Lieutenant Pike started pepper-spraying the students who were sitting down. I couldn't believe it! When it happened the rest of us started moving in and the cop freaked, turned around and sprayed us too. I got up close to him, had a camera, I was trying to do a legal observer thing and I think Pike saw my goggles and that made him mad and he let me have it right in the face. I was like, 'That stings a lot, but my eyes are OK,' so I got a great picture of him."
She had started to read BAsics: "Yeah, the world is really messed up, and this country is THE shit hole. I really agree with that." She said she wanted to understand better what we mean by revolution. "Some people I've met in Occupy say their mission is revolution—it isn't really—but what I do respect about them is their open forum and the exchange of ideas: people being able to say whatever they want. It's a place where you can talk about stuff like communism without being silenced by your peers. I think it's an icebreaker. I honestly don't think the university would have allowed you to come here and sell this book if it had not been for Occupy. They do NOT want another Lieutenant Pike incident," she laughed, "Thank you, Lieutenant Pike!"
We talked about the quotes in Chapter 3 of BAsics, "Making Revolution," and the strategy for revolution.
She said BAsics "is real specific: it talks about methodology, which I think is really important." She said she really liked the first chapter but has encountered a lot of people who "say they don't want to hear about the horrors of the world." We talked with her about this and what's in Chapter 4, "Understanding the World," and how fearlessly confronting reality with scientific and critical thinking is an essential part of the BAsics of making revolution and changing the world.
While all kinds of questions are still buzzing in her head, she is thinking about other people she could get together with to discuss the ideas in the book, and talked about posting quotes from BAsics on Facebook, and that she wanted to help get the book into the campus library. She hung out at the table until we had to pack up and leave.
Next stop Berkeley and the Central Valley, one of the agricultural heartlands of the country... stay tuned! And go to our blog for updates: basicsbustour.tumblr.com.
1. "The book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has shined a bright and much needed light on the reality of profound injustice at the very core of this country.
"And this brings me back to a very basic point:
"This system, in this country, in the whole history of its treatment of Black people, what has it been?
"First, Slavery... Then, Jim Crow—segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror... And now, The New Jim Crow—police brutality and murder, wholesale criminalization and mass incarceration, and legalized discrimination yet again.
"That's it for this system: Three strikes and you're out!" [back]
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
