Revolution #200, May 1, 2010
Campaign Diary, April 25, 2010
New York
The campaign has begun to get into a higher gear here in NYC. On April 8 Raymond Lotta spoke to over 200 people at Columbia University on the history and future of communist revolution.1 I walked on to a campus well-decorated with flyers, then listened to Lotta's hard-hitting speech. The questions that followed were very good. Several people questioned, or argued, about the role of individual incentive in human nature, and you could tell Lotta relished getting these challenges. Others said that they were thinking about communism and socialism, but wondered why the revolutionaries in China ultimately lost2 or raised that while they thought that Lotta had some real points in exposing how the academic authorities have lied about revolution, why should they believe him? A high point – Lotta squaring off in debate with a questioner who favored the Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, the fair-haired boy of the institution and the popularizer of micro-lending as the solution for poverty in the oppressed nations.3 Lotta's blistering critique of the sacred cow of micro-lending had people gasping and objecting... but it was echoed a few days later when an exposure hit the NY Times on how micro-loans had become a major source of loan-sharking, by major, along with lesser, institutions of global capitalism. Still others raised how exactly a revolution could triumph in a country like the U.S., with all the complexity of its society and its behemoth-like power. Clearly, these students had never heard the views put forward by Lotta before and for more than a few, whether their initial response was positive or negative or just turmoil, he rocked their world.
Some people there had been building for Lotta's program at Harvard, and the emcee let the audience know that the campus paper there had refused to run an ad for the program and that campus police had arrested one organizer for posting a flyer for this on a bulletin board. Lotta had challenged the "leading authority on the Cultural Revolution" in academia in a powerful open letter, and the response of the institution – and the authority – had been to try to evade and/or shut down debate. I heard later that over 100 students turned out for the program up there that happened the next week. That's one airtight kingdom where people need more oxygen...and I heard that the people working the Raymond Lotta tour were trying to figure out more ways to get it to them before the semester ended.
Meanwhile back in NY, I talked a few days later with a couple of people who were bringing the campaign to Harlem and Washington Heights. I had talked earlier with one of the people about the enthusiastic response of people in the community to the way that the illegitimate and abusive actions of the authorities are being challenged by the revolutionaries, and how it was beginning to give the masses a sense of an "alternate political and moral authority" taking root.
Another person in the discussion had also spoken earlier to comrades in the party, describing the powerful effect that the Revolution talk by Bob Avakian had on the people he had showed it to in the projects. "But we've got to keep coming back to people," he told me, "because all this other stuff out here keeps pulling at them." He also told me about the important role that reading through Bob Avakian had played in his own development – particularly in going against the "biggest lie of all," that attempts at revolution have been a disaster. This ex-prisoner had his marked-up copy of the pamphlet Revolution And Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation with him, and said that he was part way through it – he was beginning to grapple with the section on Marxism as a science. We spent the afternoon wrangling over a wide range of theoretical questions – from the history of the revolution the Soviet Union and the role of Trotsky, to the relation between theory and practice (and how theory has to run ahead of practice), to the contradiction between people in this society who are trained to work with ideas and the masses who are locked out of this – and why and how communist revolution can and must overcome this.
That same week I was also able to meet with a number of younger revolutionaries and radicals to get into Bob Avakian's critical article, "There Is No 'Permanent Necessity' for Things To Be This Way – A Radically Different and Better World Can Be Brought Into Being Through Revolution." These young comrades were eager to get into what was being said there and how it applied to the campaign. One young guy said that when he read the part about how we are not yet, in any consistent and compelling way, giving people an understanding that the "world does NOT have to be this way, and we ARE BUILDING a movement for revolution," he said "oh, shit" to himself. "In fact," he said, "I had about five 'oh, shit' moments when I read this." The importance of this point on "we ARE BUILDING" was echoed by others in the room, and we got deeply into it. And that in turn raised a host of other questions, from how a revolutionary situation could come into being to what kind of a strategy would a revolutionary force use to overcome the enemy in a different situation in a country like this, one where millions were aroused and ready to put everything on the line for basic change.
A few nights later, I went to a program sponsored by Revolution Books, featuring the great Kenyan writer Ngugi wa'Thiongo. Here too a few hundred people came out to listen to Ngugi talk about his wonderful new memoir Dreams In a Time of War, and his lifelong work in "decolonizing the mind." If you haven't read Ngugi, you ought to, and this new memoir is a good place to start – Ngugi came of age in the years of the Mau Mau liberation struggle against the British in Kenya and then became a fierce opponent of neo-colonialism in Africa (that is, the way that the imperialist powers continued to rule, but now through African elites). This benefit wasn't officially part of the campaign, but it added into and cross-fertilized with all the different elements that make up the "mix" of the campaign – and it was a good thing to see a whole lot of people who were into Ngugi discovering Revolution Books for the first time and reading through copies of "The Revolution We Need...The Leadership We Have" – the campaign's foundational statement – as they sat waiting for the program to begin.
That was Thursday the 15th. The next Saturday morning I checked a blog of the scientist PZ Myers, who was writing about a forum he had participated in with Bob Bossie, the progressive Catholic activist, and Sunsara Taylor, the writer for Revolution newspaper, on morality at the University of Chicago. Myers wrote very favorably about the program, and from there I went to Sunsara's blog and caught up on her tour "From the Burkha to the Thong: Everything Must, and Can, Change – WE NEED TOTAL REVOLUTION!" She had given speeches during this same period at UCLA and in Hawaii that grabbed the audiences and, like Lotta's, sparked very deep questions and a powerful sense of never having heard this kind of thing before. I checked out some of the youtubes of her answering audiences at her Berkeley program – and you got the same sense that you did with Lotta that she relished taking on the most backward, but unquestioned, ideas out there that "everyone knows" – and very few have ever heard questioned.
Finally, on Tuesday night I went to a forum at Revolution Books throwing it open on Avakian's "There Is No Permanent Necessity..." article. I had been studying over and discussing the article with different people going into this, getting different takes and looking at it from different angles. And I had also been taking walks during the week and listening on my iPod to the 3rd part of the Revolution talk, about how a revolution is possible and how conditions could come together where such a revolution could happen and the challenges that would pose to a vanguard. A room of 60 or so people heard a presentation based on a very close reading of the article, and then discussed and debated over the essential message of the article, and how it applied. There was some interesting back-and-forth wrangling, and then a comrade used the new issue of Revolution on the environmental emergency to make a very clarifying point: "there's a lot that this issue does, including exposing the depth and dimensions of the crisis... the role of capitalism in causing this and its inability to solve it... the communist view toward the environment... but most of all, what comes through, including in the way it lays out the solution, is the fact that things don't have to be this way...a whole other – and far better – way is possible."
As I left the bookstore people were still discussing and debating, and setting up meetings to make plans for the upcoming May 1 march. The goal: make a major new impact with the message and call that set this whole campaign off, and has to animate it throughout: "The Revolution We Need...The Leadership We Have."
Two weeks that were beginning to feel more like a campaign... Now let's step it up!
1. Lotta's speech is titled "Everything You've Been Told About Communism Is Wrong, Capitalism Is A Failure, Revolution Is the Solution." The speech has been given at New York University, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, Columbia University and Harvard University. [back]
2. China was a genuine socialist country under revolutionary communist leadership until the counter-revolutionary coup d'etat that followed one month after Mao's death in 1976. A faction within the Communist Party set about re-establishing capitalism, while keeping the name of socialism. [back]
3. Micro-lending is the practice of extending small loans to artisans (embroiderers, tailors, etc.), often at high interest, to build up a class of petty entrepreneurs. Often this is targeted toward women and is promoted as the way to bring liberation to women in the oppressed nations and spark development. In fact, these loans serve to build up a few people as petty capitalists (and these petty capitalists use child labor and the super-exploited labor of other impoverished women to make their profits) while enchaining many others into debt servitude; as for development, this practice reinforces the ways in which the oppressed nations are locked into dependent, unequal and oppressive relationships to the imperialist powers. [back]
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