Revolution Club: On the Trains and Subways—and on a Mission to Spread Word About the New Film and Revolution

September 21, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From members of the Revolution Club, Los Angeles:

A team of three people from the Revolution Club jumped onto the city train and subways system with just a basic flyer promoting the upcoming preview screening of the new speech from Bob Avakian, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, and the pamphlet How We Can Win. We were very determined and on a mission to spread the word and hopped from train car to train car making public service announcements to tell people about the screening and what it’s all about. We were on a train in South Central and all different sorts of people were on the train. Lots of Black and Latino masses. But also students, scholars, lawyers, doctors and nurses, artists, people from every nationality and walk of life.

We would start off by talking about the way the world is, we would hold up the “5 Stops” and talk about maybe just one or two of them. We agitated about the 12,000 children locked away along the border and the consequences of Brett Kavanaugh being appointed to the Supreme Court, or the case of Laquan McDonald and how the police get away with murder after murder. We really drew from the recent articles on revcom.us, how they described what the film was about and who needed to see it. One comrade described the difference in their agitation saying they felt that this enabled them to speak to everyone rather than speaking to those who are more “attuned to revolution.” We were quick and concise with what this was all about.

When people heard what it was all about, some would put out their hands for the flyer. People would applaud, one woman stood up and said, “I want to support you!” and we quickly gave her a stack of flyers and told her of some ways to get involved before we had to jump off. The majority of people on the trains took the flyers and expressed interest. Especially among the Black masses you would see them close their eyes as if we had struck a deep chord, and small groups of people would scramble to grab the flyer.

There was also contention. There were people who said we had to deal with these problems by voting. So we took it on sharply and asked, “When has voting ever stopped the mass murder of Black and brown people by police?” One person said, “I’m for Jesus” and when we said, “But Jesus isn’t going to save us,” the guy threatened to call the police. Some of the masses took this on and told them to leave us alone and challenged him on that bullshit.

At one point the trains were so packed that nobody could move so we had to rely on masses to pass things out. One high school student said, “This is just like high school, take one pass it down.” Others took up the responsibility and handed it to people near them.

We got the sense that people are more paying attention to what’s going on, and clearly some of them were agonizing about it. We were able to create a scene everywhere we went and overall, it was a really positive example of being that bold social force. An example of achieving critical mass, even just the three of us by being bold and not half-stepping with what we are all about. There was something special about all the different sections of the people who are normally so isolated from each other, grabbing these flyers and expressing support. There was something important about people seeing that others really do care about these horrors. Including Black people seeing white people take this up, elderly and the youth, men and women, people from all different walks of life and different conditions. You could really see a glimpse of a future society. Goddamn this WAS FUN!

There is so much potential for this film to really put revolution on the map as something really contending as a possible future. People are listening and thinking about things, and when people find out that there is another path forward people start questioning all sorts of things. Let’s take this film and change the whole world.