Revolution #198, April 11, 2010
Lessons of the Revolution:
The Message and the Call... and the Revolution Talk
Supporters of the RCP, USA have been interviewing people in different cities, trying to learn about the impact of our campaign to let people know what communist revolution is really all about... to get them acquainted with the leadership of this revolution, Bob Avakian and the RCP, USA which he leads... and to forge a core of determined fighters for this vision and this revolution.
We will be reporting on what we have been learning in the weeks to come. And we ask anyone reading this paper who has criticisms, observations or other feedback to give us to write to us. But right now we want to sum up two big lessons in particular.
One: we have not done nearly enough to popularize the message and call that is the heart of this campaign—"The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have." Yes, we distributed some at different points, and we used the recording of this... but we have not grasped how important it is for people to see this everywhere, and to see this over and over. Once, twice, even three times is not nearly enough. In fact, when we have interviewed people and introduced this by reading over the call with them, people tell us that this gives them a very clear idea of our aims and objectives, and what we are trying to do. And this is true even if they have seen it before. There is really nothing like this—nothing that puts out, in language with such power and clarity, the basic communist vision and the understanding of how we can make a revolution... and the sense of the leadership that we have to actually achieve all this.
Two: we have not done nearly enough with Bob Avakian's talk Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About. People from all walks of life have told us over and over that there is nothing like this. Some have suggested to us that it should be constantly playing in Revolution Books stores. Many tell us that they often didn't get its power until they had watched it all the way through—and one person said that it was only after watching it three times that he actually began to get it. We should certainly learn from this and make even more use of it. Put it this way—anyone who comes around this campaign should find it quite easy to hook into a group that is viewing and discussing this regularly. Anyone who wants to make this campaign succeed should be making sure that they are setting up watching sessions of it. And everyone should be watching this, returning to it, learning from both the content and from the method used by Chairman Avakian to break things down. All this, of course, should be coupled with spreading this even more broadly, especially on the Internet.
On the weekend before May Day (April 24 and 25), we are going to focus our efforts on distributing the REVOLUTION talk in English and Spanish, distributing the promotional materials for the video, and posting quotes from the talk (available at revcom.us/revtalkpromo).
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