Revolution Books New York Emergency Meeting:

A Call to Everyone Who Cares About the Future of Humanity and Our Planet: Raise the Funds to Save and Move Revolution Books

May 11, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On May 7, Revolution Books in New York City held an emergency meeting. Andy Zee, spokesperson for the store, made opening remarks. Following is an edited and expanded version of those remarks.

Your being here tonight really matters. It matters in a personal way to everybody who’s worked in this store, but it matters much more for the future of humanity. This is not hyperbole. Each of you and others who have responded to the Call to Save Revolution Books, are on the cusp of a social movement that must grow overnight to raise the money to Save and Move Revolution Books RIGHT NOW.

Faced with the necessity to move, we can and must turn this situation into new freedom—making RB a major factor in New York City, with impact around the world. The necessity to raise the $150,000 in emergency funds can be the catalyst to build a huge base of support for and involvement with Revolution Books at a moment when the Baltimore uprising captured the imagination and conscience of people around the world. We are entering times when people feel the import of Revolution Books.

The situation is this:

RB has been operating at this location on a month-by-month basis. The store has just been leased at market value—a much higher rent—and RB must move by the end of May. Confronting this situation, we have decided to make a BIG move that will be signal to all that REVOLUTION BOOKS IS NOT GOING AWAY, but instead will become even more of a force and pole of attraction by moving to Harlem.

This is a big move. HARLEM is where RB should be now. Harlem with its rich history of struggle and intellectual ferment, and pathbreaking art, music, and literature. At the same time, Harlem has been and remains today a concentration of the foundational oppression of Black people: of housing projects run like prisons, militarized police raids on those projects; setting up, framing, and sending the youth to prison. And all this runs smack up against the energy, creativity, and cultural legacy of the people and place of Harlem. In recent decades, there is a new diversity of people in Harlem—new immigrants from Central America and Africa, as well as middle class white people, including students. There’s a new energy in the air. All of this will infuse the new RB, and RB will bring the potential of a radically new world through revolution to Harlem and the world.

To make this real requires serious money now. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY MEETING AND WE ARE TONIGHT SOUNDING AN URGENT CALL. To NOT LOSE RB REQUIRES RAISING $150,000 NOW.

These funds are absolutely essential to sign a lease, to fulfill past obligations, to renovate the new space, to move and to publicize the move. This $150,000 is WHAT IS NEEDED. It is not optional.

Revolution Books fills a great need and this is a time when RB is needed more than ever. Because of this acute need, there is a basis to find the people who see this reality and provide them with an opportunity to contribute to the place that is about ending all that torments humanity and is a center for building a movement for revolution to bring about a radically different and better future.

This morning I re-watched a YouTube of a Baltimore youth on the morning after the uprising ... he was filled with passionate determination that he and the brothers and sisters gathered round him would not take this abuse any longer. He was running on adrenaline. He turned the cell phone camera on a young woman friend’s wound from a plastic police bullet the night before... With great emotion, he described how the police do the youth and said, on the morning after a night of fierce struggle to break free, “I’m optimistic.”

Beginning last August in Ferguson and continuing through the fall nationwide, then re-energized with the April 14 “Shut It Down” Protests Against Police Murder in cities across the country, and now on a whole other level with Baltimore—where people’s outrage and hunger for real change burst forth in ways not seen in decades. A new day is being shaped. A new people needs Revolution Books.

You can see this potential written on the faces of the youth who filled the streets with joy and determination declaring, “Black Lives Matter!” and “Stop Police Murder!” At the same time, important new books, films, and art are being created which dig into and tell the stories of slavery, the civil rights and Black liberation movements, and the situation of Black people today. There are new insights and revelations, controversy, and debate over the scale and scope of this oppression, how foundational to America is it, is it systemic, and what is the solution?

It is written in the footsteps of the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in September in New York City to Save the Environment.

It is written in the faces of people who traveled to the desert Texas town where a protest was held last weekend against the brutal incarceration of innocent women and children fleeing poverty and war in Mexico and Central America.

It is written in the rage of young women and men from the campuses in the U.S. to the streets of India, Pakistan, and South America... speaking the unspoken against the rape, degradation, and oppression of women.

All this could be the first winds of a complex struggle with the potential to be a part of the fight for real liberation.

Yet, the murder of Black youth by police continues, war rages on in the Middle East, nothing is done to save the planet... and the system continues on  every front and in every sphere—destroying lives and crushing spirits. These horrors drive home that Revolution Books is needed now more than ever. It is also a moment when Revolution Books could be lost. But, you, and we, have something to say and do about that. Your contribution, your raising funds, your being a part of moving and renovating RB will make the difference.

RB’s mission is this: People come into Revolution Books from all over the world to find the books and the deep engagement about why the world is the way it is and the possibility of a radically different way the world could be. Scientific and poetic, wrangling and visionary, Revolution Books is at the center of building a movement for revolution.

It is quite simply true that there is no other place, no other bookstore, that is dedicated to this mission. RB gives people the opportunity to engage with a scientific understanding of history and the world today. The store is infused with the morality and vision that lifts people’s sights to struggle for a world that is overcoming all forms of exploitation and oppression. And RB does this with big arms to engage and embrace wide spheres and tributaries of intellectual and cultural life that are a part of fighting for a new world.

What makes this possible is the scientific method and approach, the vision and architecture for a radically new society made possible by a pathbreaking strategy for revolution. All of this and more is concentrated in the new synthesis of communism developed by the revolutionary leader, Bob Avakian, “BA.”

Bob Avakian has looked deeply at the first attempts of the slaves to form new societies to overcome all forms of oppression—the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions of the 20th century—digging into their great accomplishments as well as their errors and shortcomings and why they were defeated by imperialism decades ago. He draws from a broad range of human experience, and has developed a new synthesis of revolution and communism. This is a framework for a new society that is moving to end all the inequalities, all the divisions—the oppression of different nationalities; the oppression of women and people of different genders; the division between those who have the privilege of working with their minds and those who work in manual labor; as well as working to overcome the devastation of the planet.

The movement for revolution that RB is at the center of today, what happens here in the store every day, and the society and world we are fighting to bring into being involves a process—a scientific method and approach that gives great scope to intellectual work, ferment, and dissent as a key part of how people come to understand and act to change the world.

Revolutionary theory, history, science, and the arts live at RB and are appreciated, engaged, and critically mined for insight and inspiration, to enable us all to deepen our understanding of the world and to discover and to act on the pathways to liberate humanity. This is not just a dream, but is rooted in the deep contradictions of the system of capitalism-imperialism that rules the world today. Revolution Books is where all of this is probed and engaged by a diversity of people and viewpoints, and where there is a movement for a real revolution that is leading the struggle to make it a reality.

Authors, filmmakers, actors, and poets remark that the critical engagement and dialogue at RB is like no other. There is a passion for getting at what’s true, a morality of serving the people, dialogue carried forth with a mutual respect that comes from the profound place of putting the interests of the oppressed of the world first in heart and mind.

Everyone can experience this ethos and principled struggle at its highest level in the new film of the historic dialogue between Cornel West and Bob Avakian that took place at Riverside Church on November 15, 2014 before 1,900 people, REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion. Watch the video and get a living sense of what is opened up by BA and the revolution that is at the heart of RB. More, at Revolution Books people can find and dig into Bob Avakian’s extensive body of work—books, films, talks—work that opens up a new era for revolution and a new stage of communism.

Revolution Books fights for critical thinking. Youth learn the method and import of science and the science of revolution. RB involves a unique and rare mix of people, from university students to people from the hardest streets, youth and people with years of experience, different nationalities, people from all over the world, and different genders—all coming together to grapple with how to understand and respond to all the various ways the system comes at the people—and why and how humanity can do so much better.

At RB, the whole world comes first ... people engage and learn the real history of this country and its imperialist role in the world today. All of this comes from the deep morality put forward by Bob Avakian that we need to bring forward a people and movement for the emancipation of all humanity—and not “the first shall be last and last shall be first.”

Revolution Books’ move to Harlem—where, as I said earlier, the hard streets and projects that live under the constant terror of the NYPD are right alongside the campuses of Columbia University and the City College of New York and a wealth of cultural richness—will enrich one of the unique treasures of Revolution Books: the mix of people who engage ideas together with urgency and collective spirit. The sense of being isolated and despised that those who catch the hardest hell experience gets broken down, the important work that artists and scholars do enriches those normally denied access to this knowledge, and the intellectuals are impacted and transformed themselves, coming to understand the reality of this country on a whole other level.

Take a look at the breadth of writers, artists, and voices of conscience who have read, performed, dialogued, and spoken at RB including: Edwidge Danticat, Eve Ensler, Ngügï wa Thiong’o, Arturo O’Farrill, Saul Williams, Walter Mosley, Lewis Lapham, and Wallace Shawn, among many others. These beautiful and important voices, engaged at this place, with this breadth of audience and the revolutionary method and approach I’ve talked about tonight, this, too, is at stake in our fight to re-open Revolution Books in Harlem. There is NO PLACE else where people engage the burning questions of today the way they are discussed at RB. Watch the videos, listen to what those who have spoken and performed at RB have said about their experience.

Before moving on to how we are going to raise the funds and make this move a big deal, let me underscore that what is at stake is nothing less than the present and the future, and, in a very living sense, what we learn from the past. How people understand reality shapes what they do, how they fight back, with what objectives, how they determine friends of the people from enemies, how differences among the people should be taken up, how to fight and how to win—not just the immediate struggle, whether in the streets or in the realm of ideology and culture, but how to win in bringing about a whole new society through revolution. Without Revolution Books, without this place with the scientific spirit of discovery, the critical thinking, the poetic spirit, and the engagement with revolutionary theory and a broad spectrum of intellectual, cultural, and scientific work, without a place that can connect people to the movement for revolution and its leadership, no matter how heroically people fight, no matter how passionately people expose and denounce the current state of the world, it will stay as it is.

Take a moment and think, and ask yourself what you can do now to answer the call:

Humanity Needs Revolution

The Revolution Needs Revolution Books

Revolution Books Needs You!

Tonight I am asking you to give all you can to the emergency fund drive. Make a pledge and donate part of the funds tonight and more going forward. EVERY DONATION MAKES A DIFFERENCE. But, if you can give $500, $1,000 or pledge $5,000, do so.

But even if all of you here give all you can tonight, to raise $150,000 will require providing hundreds and even thousands of people the opportunity to make a huge difference by contributing to Revolution Books.

When you ask people to donate, you are building the community that will sustain RB. A community of people engaged with the books, the films, the programs, and the movement that RB is at the heart of.

Yes, people need money to survive in this outrageously expensive city, but that, too, underscores the need for a world where people could live and flourish collectively. Many people donate to many causes, but very few causes get to the root of getting free of a system that requires charity to deal with the outrages that are the product of that system itself. Giving to the Emergency Fund of RB is about changing that. That’s why struggling with people to donate big funds is not about giving to “our” thing, but about donating for the future.

I want to say to people who are new to this that you don’t have to agree with everything I've said tonight—whether about the new synthesis of communism or the necessity and possibility of revolution—to be a part of saving Revolution Books. If you can recognize the great difference it makes that we have a place where people are engaging revolution, where this conversation takes place; and, on the other hand, if you can see the reality that without this bookstore where the questions posed by a movement and a theory that says that the world doesn't have to be this way and that it could be radically different through revolution and which looks at revolution in a radically different way than is the common discourse in society, including in the universities, people's political imaginations of what could be possible would be stunted. If you recognize that, you can see why RB really matters and why you should support it.

You can be a part of the movement to save Revolution Books, donating and raising funds, while you are finding and figuring out what you think about the revolution it is at the center of, the process of doing and thinking, engaging and struggling that is the lifeblood of the movement for revolution and of RB. We have plenty of room for people to engage and argue over all these questions. But... do so while making sure that Revolution Books continues to thrive. Because if we don’t raise the money, then that could be cut off. We should understand that. Together with your support, we are determined that will not happen.

Some people have said this is a lot of money to raise and they’re right. So we need to break this down. I am asking you tonight to be a part of working on figuring this out. The plan is being forged as we are carrying it out. But here are some ways to begin to think about it:

What about 100 students becoming Friends of RB for $60 a year. That comes to $5 a month. And, it also comes to $6,000. Can’t we go out and find 50 professors who will donate between $250 and $1,000? We should aim to raise $15,000 to $20,000 from professors. We should go door to door and get lots of people to contact friends and relatives and workmates and raise $100-$250 from them. We are working to find patrons and large donors. And, in June, we will launch an Indiegogo Campaign with the objective of raising something on the order of $50,000... All of this is to stimulate thinking and to get things going.

Revolution Books needs loans—funds so that we can quickly renovate new space and make the move. As we do fundraising over the summer and then re-open the store, these loans will be repaid.

Immediate Plans:

For the next eight days, we are going to go far and wide raising funds and spreading word of the emergency fundraising to Save and Move Revolution Books. Then beginning Friday night, May 15, we are going to have an Open House Weekend of events to raise funds that will be a grand send off for Revolution Books on 26th Street.

Once again, think of the difference it will make to have Revolution Books re-born in Harlem, able to dramatically expand its programming and stock of books, changing people and changing the world.

Dig deep into your pocket, heart, and conscience. DONATE and SPREAD THE WORD—play your part in opening up vistas for understanding why the world is the horror it is for the majority of humanity, and how it could be radically transformed.

Humanity Needs Revolution

The Revolution Needs Revolution Books

Revolution Books Needs You!

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