I was able to watch the third installment of the Bob Avakian “Heart and Soul & Hard-Core for Revolution” with comrades and friends from the Revolution Club in Chicago, and I wanted to share a few things about the experience. If you haven’t seen it—and even if you have—this is a truly incredible 2 hours, where you not only get a course in the principles, methods and morals of the new communism, and in what the new society will look and feel like, but BA just opens his heart in a very moving way.

I got there early, but pretty much right away I got a real sense of elan from the revcoms in charge. It was relaxed and friendly, but at the same time serious. People were looking at literature and talking, and there were two people selling handmade headbands with STOP PATRIARCHY and other patches, along with jewelry, to raise funds. By the time we got a few minutes into it, there were maybe 35 people at the viewing, with half from the surrounding south side neighborhoods and a few from the west side, plus people from the north side and the burbs. (For those who don’t know, Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., with the south and west Sides mainly Black, with some Latino neighborhoods, and the north side overwhelmingly white, with some more mixed neighborhoods.)

The people there included a newer woman who has come all three times. She had known a revcom who recently died and decided to check the club out because of that revcom’s influence—and this time she brought her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend. There was a woman whose son had been murdered by the police and met the revcoms in the struggle for justice—she brought about half a dozen friends and family. There were two Iranians, one from way back in the day who has remained active and follows the new communism.

While a good portion of people were brand-new to this, this was a very attentive and involved audience. People got audible during BA’s agitation on dictatorship and his powerful pointing to the cold-blooded murder of Fred Hampton by the police and FBI and the massacre of prisoners (and guards) at Attica by the state police, and there was a real response to the messages delivered directly to the youth in the last two questions, especially “I see you out there pushing the little ones around. I see the pride that you have in the little ones. So don’t tell me you don’t care, because I know different and I know better.”

At the end of the meeting, the leader of the club made some short but on-the-mark remarks to give people a sense of what they could do to spread this and to call on people to get interviewed (two people did). Then one of the other main members read the quote from BAsics 4:15, that “The truth will not set us free, in and of itself, but we will not get free without the truth,” and we broke down for informal discussion.

I talked with people afterward—people I knew and people brand new—and there was a really good vibe. One of the younger guys who came with the fighter for justice for her son asked a comrade, “How long has he (BA) been doing this?” and when she told him, he just said “man, he really knows what he’s talking about.” I heard a newer person working with the club explain to people she brought that to really get this they needed to talk with the leaders of the meeting, who can really take you through it and break it down. “Go out with them and then when you get in trouble they’ll help you,” or something to that effect. People were talking to me about what BA said on the base and superstructure and another person talked about what it was like coming up from Arkansas when they still had the factories in Chicago, and what it’s like for these youth out here today.

The next morning I had a chance to check in with some of the core revcoms. I decided in the short time I had to ask them what they learned the previous night—including, of course, what they thought of the amazing interview of BA.

An older veteran revolutionary—someone who has lost people to the internecine violence among Black youth, friends when younger and in recent years at least one relative—began by talking about how the three interviews fit together with this last one as the pulling together a lot of themes. He then went to the question of friendships, and that “these are people in your heart.” Responding to what BA had said about his friend Billy, this veteran said that “when you lose a friend, somebody you really care about… I understand why people act the way they do. You get the visceral. I thought about all the motherfuckers I grew up with—I knew who they were before they got into all that madness—this part connected to me and it can connect to others in that kind of way. People change. BA wasn’t always like this—you got to see the influence of his family, his opportunity to work with ideas, but then also things like the ‘spoiled brat’ story, and being influenced by the two people who embraced him. The whole question of getting this out is gonna be really important—there’s this whole question of revenge… I had it thick, even after I became a revolutionary. I remember when I would argue for keeping nuclear weapons [when the revolution had state power]—like ‘we made all these sacrifices and we’re not gonna give this shit up’—vs what BA says, about ‘the whole world comes first.’ This interview makes you go to your own thinking. I think we should have clips where people compare and contrast with how they were thinking about something, and then how they heard BA said this and such about the same thing, and people could talk about the change they went through—and say ‘thank you BA.’ There’s just a lot of richness in these interviews.” I know this comrade pretty well—he’s usually kind of an understated guy but he was pretty intensely feeling it that morning.

Then another revcom (who’s also lost people to the violence) responded to this—that he understood “why BA remained ‘in the game’ so long when others went differently.” He agreed with the first comrade on the question of the heart. At the same time, he emphasized that “BA took the scientific approach—this hit me in a way where he analyzed the things that happened to his friends, to the point where the bigger picture was at stake, he went to the macro—not the micro—and when he was talking about that I was like Neo [in The Matrix] going ‘whoa,’ because there’s so much anger wrapped up with people around the deaths that come from the police and from the violence among the masses—that they miss the macro and focus on the micro, but BA had to keep the focus on humanity…”

A newer comrade spoke to the way that he had been getting the sweep of all this, first reviewing the first two parts and emphasizing overall the need to transform how people think. He also was struck by the whole discussion of revenge in what we had seen the night before, but also very much by the part on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America and what he was understanding about the sweep of the interviews as a whole. In fact, he had introduced the question of revenge into the discussion, approaching it more from the way in which the rule of law discussion unfolded, and then went to the Constitution and why we not only need the right to disagree, but we need to hear people’s disagreements, including because they may be right. And he too remarked on the importance of “learning not just about BA but how he came to be the way he is.” He said there had been an on-line criticism of the first interview, in which BA discusses the importance of the poetic spirit, that “spirit and soul have nothing to do with science.” He contrasted this to the understanding that he got from the interview that without the poetic spirit, and the awe and wonder, things will go wrong—that there is a connection. The main thing overall he focused on is that we gotta go out and fiercely struggle with how people are living—that “the system conditions people either to be the fucker or fucked… but people have aspirations for something better.”

Conclusion? This interview of Bob Avakian has a special power to reach inside of people with every level of understanding and raise everyone up. It changes you, if you let it. I had to leave, but I left more determined than ever to help spread this… as part of hastening a whole new society based on the science and heart concentrated in the new communism.