Building the August 9, 2014 Break ALL the Chains Celebrations, and Raising Funds & Involving People in the BA Everywhere Campaign

July 14, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Accompanying this article is a compelling vision of Break ALL the Chains celebrations to bring a broad range of people together on August 9, 2014 at the mid-point of the BA Everywhere summer campaign and to celebrate the publication of Break ALL the Chains! Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution. In this article we want to share a basic conception of how these events and the BA Everywhere campaign should be built over the next four weeks.

First, BA Everywhere committees should make necessary arrangements to reserve a venue for the celebrations. In areas where it is difficult to secure a place, put a hold on a park and an indoor location—pending forging a group of people and working out a vision and plan for the event in your area.

This week BA Everywhere committees should go out to [1] all the people we have met and come to know over the last few years; and [2] also start going out and speaking with as many groups of people and individuals who are concerned about and/or are working in different ways on the situation and struggle that women face. Bring to all these people BAsics 3:22, the new publication of Break ALL the Chains!...(download PDF of full pamphlet or sampler), the BA Everywhere national brochure. Talk with people about the basic vision for August 9, get their ideas and involve them in planning and building the event.

The heart of these discussions with people should be BAsics 3:22—“You cannot break all the chains, except one...”. Introduce people to the new pamphlet, Break ALL the Chains, and to BA and the new synthesis of communism. Find out how they are looking at the situation women face as well as the larger world. Discuss the BA Everywhere campaign—what it is, what difference it could make, how they can be a part of raising funds, spreading the world through palm cards and on social media, and finding ways to involve them in the campaign. Some will want to work on August 9—organizing the food, doing publicity, doing outreach where they live or work or out more broadly. Some may want to reach out to performers. Find out people's ideas for the August 9 event—what they think it should be and how to build it. Ask how they would like to contribute and begin a process of working together. One thing that would make a difference is if people would help set up speaking engagements for the BA Everywhere committee reaching out to all kinds of groups—from summer camps and schools, to professional groups (legal, art, community, religious, etc.) about what BA Everywhere is and what a difference it could make, what is concentrated in BAsics 3:22, and to invite people to come to the August 9 Break ALL the Chains celebrations.

Forging a core of people—a real collective “we”—that is putting together the August 9 celebration and is working in that and other ways with the BA Everywhere campaign is a different way of working than many of the BA Everywhere committees have been organizing for some time now. This is not just calling a meeting, but going out and starting a process that creates a “we.” This will involve thinking and doing in new ways. For example, not everyone we work with will necessarily be coming to committee meetings, or all to the same meeting, but instead we are developing and leading a process where people are collectively working together in an organized way that is guided by the content of 3:22 and what BA Everywhere is all about.

This matters, because without many people working together, there will be no massive fundraising to popularize BA on a level that will make societal impact. Without people becoming conscious and organized, there will be no revolution, and the world will go on as it is—which from the Gaza to the Texas border is a goddamn horror.

BA Everywhere this summer has two facets that interpenetrate and work together—one, which is key overall for the movement as a whole, is making breakthroughs in BA Everywhere really becoming the leading edge of the whole movement for revolution—with particular focus on work with the youth and others in the hoods where people catch the hardest hell from this system. Taking out and digging into the Break ALL the Chains sampler is a decisive part of this. This summer we are calling this “Revolution in the City.” (See “Summer 2014: Making-Advances… Toward Revolution.”)

At the same time, BA Everywhere committees should be reaching out far and wide into the middle classes, including students and youth. BA Everywhere should be speaking to groups as said above, canvassing neighborhoods, going to music, theater, street, and food festivals. Everywhere bringing the campaign and raising funds.

Even as August 9 will focus on the liberation of women and will be a major nodal point of the summer, between now and then the BA Everywhere Campaign should be taking out the full message of the campaign, including making new leaps with the 1000 Years–$1000 project; spreading and raising funds for the T-shirts with BA image and Revolution—Nothing Less!; getting out BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian; and showing the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION-NOTHING LESS! as well as the film Stepping into the Future.

There should be lots of creative forms for BA Everywhere committees and for lots of new people to take up spreading BAsics 3:22, the new sampler edition of Break ALL the Chains, as well as organizing people to come out to August 9. Showing and discussing BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! should be a mainstay of BA Everywhere. We are recommending that one week before August 9, there be showings of two sections of the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! that focus on the oppression and the liberation of women. These showings could be at Revolution Books stores or other venues. More information on these showings, more new materials, and more guidance, more correspondence from people donating and taking up the campaign, including controversies will be on the BA Everywhere section of this website.

What BA has brought forward is very powerful. In a world that is being torn asunder, with people's suffering intense on every continent, with the planet itself in jeopardy, it makes all the difference in the world that there is an incredibly viable vision and plan for a whole different kind of state power that is concentrated in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America that is based on the new synthesis of communism developed by BA. That there is a strategy to actually prepare today for a time when revolution could really be possible in a country like this. And that there is a more scientific way to understand and approach all of this. This is a whole different framework, a radically different way of looking at and understanding the world. Taking this out is a challenge to how people have been thinking—which thankfully involves good and at times sharply drawn ideological struggle to change minds and win over people's hearts. Thankfully because any fundamental change to the world will only come about from people acting consciously for that change, and if they are thinking in an old-system way, then they will be not be able to really make that fundamental radical transformation that is necessary and possible.

As this happens on an ever wider scale, people can see, or be won to see, the huge difference that this will make on the whole political climate. Even if people don't yet know that much about, or don't agree with some, or even a lot of, the new synthesis of communism, they can see or be won to see, that having BA and his vision and work known in all corners of society poses big questions such as: What is going on in the world today, what is the problem humanity faces, does it have to keep going on this way, what is the solution to this, how can we bring that about? If all of this were what people were talking and debating about, that would change the whole political climate, with people thinking and wrestling with the truly urgent and monumental questions of the future for humanity and the earth we live on.

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.