Word Up for the Revolution Club in Baltimore
June 29, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
About 20 people came out to the June 14 benefit for the Revolution Club in Baltimore in the battle for justice for Freddie Gray.
"Now I can just hear these reactionary fools saying, "Well, Bob, answer me this. If this country is so terrible, why do people come here from all over the world? Why are so many people trying to get in, not get out?"...Why? I'll tell you why. Because you have fucked up the rest of the world even worse than what you have done in this country. You have made it impossible for many people to live in their own countries as part of gaining your riches and power."
BAsics 1:14
"You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can't say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution."
BAsics 3:22
The majority of the people were poets or people in circles of poets in Baltimore. Most had some familiarity with the Revolutionary Communist Party, the movement for revolution and BA from seeing Revolution newspaper/revcom.us over the years. They came out to lend support for the Revolution Club at this crucial time, even as they came at things from a variety of different perspectives and themselves were learning more. Two people came from the Baltimore Ethical Society, where excerpts of REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion; A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST & BOB AVAKIAN will be shown on July 5.
The program began with a youth who has run with the Revolution Club reading what has been his favorite quote from BAsics—"Why do people come here from all over the world?..." (1:14). Later in the program, he returned to present: "You Cannot Break All the Chains Except One" (BAsics 3:22).
Six poets read their works, including one who introduced his poetry with commentary about how he has appreciated learning of the movement for revolution, especially through regularly reading the newspaper, and expressed appreciation for BA, his works and films, and then launched into a powerful poetic calling out the oppression of Black people. Another read a poem about a prisoner at Abu Ghraib writing poetry on styrofoam cups between sessions of unspeakable torture by the U.S. One, a former political prisoner who had poured blood on draft records in 1967, spoke and read his poetry. An acoustic group performed Irish music. One poet read both his own work and did a powerful dramatic/poetic reading of "Let's imagine if we had a whole different art and culture..." (BAsics 2:8).
Midway through the program, a person from the Revolution Club gave a brief talk about the urgent need for an actual revolution, what has happened in Charleston, and about the work of the Revolution Club overall and now in Baltimore. He spoke of the decades of work that BA has done to bring forward a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world, and how the Club has been taking this out to people in the midst of and since the Baltimore uprising.
"Let's imagine if we had a whole different art and culture. Come on, enough of this "bitches and ho's" and SWAT teams kicking down doors. Enough of this "get low" bullshit. And how come it's always the women that have to get low? We already have a situation where the masses of women and the masses of people are pushed down and held down low enough already. It's time for us to get up and get on up.
"Imagine if we had a society where there was culture—yes it was lively and full of creativity and energy and yes rhythm and excitement, but at the same time, instead of degrading people, lifted us up. Imagine if it gave us a vision and a reality of what it means to make a whole different society and a whole different kind of world. Imagine if it laid out the problems for people in making this kind of world and challenged them to take up these problems. Imagine if art and culture too—movies, songs, television, everything—challenged people to think critically, to look at things differently, to see things in a different light, but all pointing toward how can we make a better world.
"Imagine if the people who created art and culture were not just a handful of people but all of the masses of people, with all their creative energy unleashed, and the time were made for them to do that, and for them to join with people who are more full-time workers and creators in the realm of art and culture to bring forward something new that would challenge people, that would make them think in different ways, that would make them be able to see things critically and from a different angle, and would help them to be uplifted and help them to see their unity with each other and with people throughout the world in putting an end to all the horrors that we're taught are just the natural order of things. Imagine all that."
BAsics 2:8
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