Revolution Club in Chicago Marches to Challenge the Violence Among the People:
“Get Out Of This Madness & Get Into Revolution”

July 13, 2020 | revcom.us

 

The Revolution Club Chicago march through a South Shore neighborhood on Sunday, July 12.

 

This summer in Chicago, young Black people’s deep anger and alienation is being taken out on people who look just like them who live across an invisible boundary a few blocks away. Killing and crippling each other is horrific enough but the flying bullets have also cut short the lives of babies, toddlers, teenagers, elderly people. All of this causing deep, deep hurt, pain and cries of enough is enough. It is felt not just in Chicago. This urgently needs to change.

This system has no answers. The racist-pig loving Trump threatens that the feds will come in and “take care” of the problem if the city does not do the job. The “liberal” Chicago mayor flips Trump off, and then tells the ACLU to get an “attitude adjustment” when it objects to rounding up youth in preventive detention and backs up the new police chief whose only answer is prison and more prison and a “jump out” squad. A similar unit was disbanded because it so egregiously and illegally terrorized entire communities.

Bob Avakian has powerfully spoken to how this situation where Black people who are suffering such terrible oppression, besieged by the police, are also killing each other in tragic numbers is heartbreaking. But he uncovers the reality: “...this too, is caused by this system—it is the system ‘working on’ people, confining masses of Black people in conditions of deprivation, degradation and hopelessness, and continually pumping at them the ‘dog eat dog’ mentality that fuels this cut-throat system of exploitation and oppression, from top to bottom.” (From “Anything But The Truth”)

The Revolution Club in Chicago has been setting out to do what BA has called for—to win these youth to the revolution that can bring down this system that is the fundamental cause of all this and bring into being a system which would uproot the conditions and transform the ways of thinking that give rise to this. Through their press conferences, in going out in the neighborhoods, reconnecting with those who have a past in “the life”—the Revolution Club challenged youth caught up in this to lift their sights above the degradation, to stop killing and dying for no good reason and to get into the revolution that can actually change all this by emancipating humanity. They also got out “Anything But The Truth” to opinion makers to support what the Revolution Club is doing about all this.

On July 11 the Revolution Club led a march and car caravan through Englewood, an impoverished Black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. There on July 4, eight people were killed or wounded, including a 14-year-old boy, when someone opened fire on people gathered for fireworks.

The march and car caravan led by the Revolution Club—”We are the revcoms, the mighty mighty revcoms... fighting for a new world...”—snaked through the residential areas where cliques are at war with other cliques a few short blocks over. The march also stopped at memorials along the way for the people who had lost their lives in the past few weeks. Interestingly, the pigs who normally maraud in this community were nowhere to be found.

The event was joined by members of Refuse Fascism with their popular sign “Fuck Trump,” a Black Lives Matter activist from another city who had grown up on the south side, a friend from Juneteenth protests and others who came out because they learned about it on-line and wanted to be part of it.

It was an important beginning. Overall, it was well received by those who saw it, and people showed their supporting by honking their car horns and raising their fist, and in one instance, a whole family joined in singing “We are the RevComs, the mighty, mighty revcoms” from their porch. The No More! flyer and a pamphlet of “Anything But The Truth” by BA were distributed. The Revolution Club has made it clear that this march was not a one-off.

The leap that is urgently needed—bringing into the revolution even a relatively small critical mass of these same youth willing to go up against everything, both among the people and up against the ruling class—that leap is still yet to be made. Doing so can have an outsized impact on being an attractive force in accumulating the thousands that are needed to lead the millions to make an actual revolution at the soonest possible time.

On the march, Niko, a leader of the Revolution Club, Chicago, drew on BAsics to indict this system that turns beautiful children into supposedly irredeemable monsters and called on the youth to get with the revolution to overthrow the system. The revolutionary message stood out. WBBM, the main news radio station in Chicago, contrasted this march with one pressuring the city for more programs. As the Revolution Club prepared to march in South Shore the next day, the interview with Niko was still being aired. Revcom.us will also be covering the Sunday march in South Shore in the next few days.

The march was also covered on local NBC station’s nightly news and on WGN Channel 9—brief but visually very powerful video of the Revolution Club marching with its banner, “Revolution Nothing Less!”

The Revolution Club, Chicago going to the masses on the South Shore.

The Revolution Club, Chicago going to the masses in South Shore.