A Challenge from a Reader of revcom.us:

Updated August 2, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

It strikes me there is a profound, urgent need—and basis—for the excerpt from Ardea Skybreak’s new book (SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION: On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism and the Leadership of Bob Avakian. An Interview with Ardea Skybreak) that is reprinted at revcom.us, to impact broadly and deeply in society at this moment—when humanity faces truly an unprecedented crisis. The question of what anyone’s life is going to be about is posed right now in a very immediate way. Does the world have to be this way? And if not, where do I fit into that picture? These are questions that the excerpt from the Skybreak book both articulates and poses... and answers... poetically, with science and soul.

With that thought, I am challenging those who read this to return to that excerpt, or read it now if you have not yet, and write to this website with your thoughts on it.

This challenge has to reach students over summer vacation, in whose hearts and minds there is a wrestling match between angst and outrage that the world is what it is, and the supposed voice of “reason” that this is all the world can be and the best one can do is to just find a place within it. It has to reach angry young people caught in the “life,” wondering if there really is another way, and who need to know that they and others like them who dedicate their lives to the revolution can be a spark that kindles the best in people of all walks of life.

It has to especially reach those young (and some older) fighters and thinkers who over the past period have awakened into political life and are grappling with what to do with their lives.

And there is another audience for this message, which impacted me personally as a veteran revolutionary communist, and which is of a piece with the excerpt from Bob Avakian’s The New Communism on the Cultural Revolution in the RCP (read by Joe Veale at revcom.us). Whether you started working with or joined the Revolution Club this morning, or have been in or around the movement for revolutionary communism for decades (or something in between), the question of what one’s life is about, “for whom and for what,” is posed repeatedly, and periodically, very sharply. Once you understand and decide to throw in with “for whom” being the seven billion people on this planet, and the “what” being emancipation of all humanity, the question of whether to continue to revitalize that in an ever-deepening scientific understanding of how things got to be this way and how they can change—without ever losing but rather continually deepening that connection between the masses and the science—poses itself repeatedly and periodically in defining ways.

So again, and with all that in mind, I want to challenge those who read this passage to correspond on it with revcom.us.

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