From a member of the Revolution Tour:

Why People Should Join the Seminars and Group Discussions on BA’s New Year’s Statement

February 1, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Editors’ Note: These are lightly edited excerpts from comments made by a member of the National Revolution Tour in preparation for the fundraising webinar.

 

I want to speak about why people should be excited about and register to join with these different seminars and group discussions on Bob Avakian’s New Year’s statement, and how important that could be. There are people that I think generally feel locked out or intimidated by some of the more heavy theoretical stuff. People like my sister, who’s never really seen herself as having enough knowledge or expertise or confidence to even understand what shapes reality. Anything in the realm of politics she feels scared off from and feels like she shouldn’t have an opinion about, which just isn’t the case at all. Speaking about a discussion I was a part of in getting into the statement, we all come from different walks of life—we share similar experiences, we have very different experiences. And the unevenness among us and how we understand the world and how we approach things, and then the coming together to actually get what’s in the New Year’s statement and get deeply into how we understand it, not just on the surface but having to work through our thinking—I think it’s just really beneficial. I’ve gotten a lot out of it....

I’ve spoken to people about some of the substance in the statement, and we’re having a discussion about how they see what happened on January 6 [when the fascists stormed the U.S. Capitol]. I’m asking them how they understand fascism. And as they’re engaging the statement, we’re talking about the appreciation we have for the analysis that BA’s given about the economic base and how that’s developed and how that changes the social relations. If I happen to be pretty caffeinated and I’m passionate about what I’m saying, they’re like: “Wow, you sound like you have a lot of conviction behind what you’re saying. I wish I had that much conviction.” Or they say: “Oh, I didn’t think about things that way before.” And I’m learning from them as well.

But the thing is, I say that we should get together and we should have more of these discussions. I volunteer with the social media team, and we put on Zoom discussions over different articles that BA has written in the past. So when people are saying: “Oh, I wish I had that conviction,” or “I never had that understanding,” and they seem to be expressing that they’re getting a lot out of our discussion, I say it’s not as if I can just sit in a room alone and recite what I know in a mirror. It’s through a process of collective wrangling with reality. It’s through a process of being excited to try and take on these difficult subjects about what’s happening and why it is actually happening. And it’s through a spirit of curiosity and inquiry and for a reason—for the emancipation of humanity—where you can be excited if you’re struggled with when you’re wrong. And sometimes you can be struggled with and you can be really stubborn about it. But this process about coming to know and understand the world scientifically—it’s something that can’t just happen in some vacuum-sealed experience. We have to be working with reality as it changes, and the strength that we have definitely is the leadership of BA and the whole framework of a scientific method and approach to reality. That sets the foundation—and then there’s our collectivity on top of that and bringing in our different strengths and different weaknesses and different perspectives, and all with a common goal in mind of how are we going to work together to get to communism, to get beyond the 4 Alls that Marx talked about,¹ to get beyond these class divisions and oppressive relations, and how are we going to emancipate humanity together and with that spirit actually go to work together. So I think that’s a big reason why people should feel compelled and not intimidated. They should feel really excited that these seminars are going to happen, and I encourage people to join them and participate and contribute their insights and what they don’t know and their questions because we can work through that together and all get a lot out of it.

 

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1. Go here for an excerpt from The New Communism by Bob Avakian, in which he gets into the 4 Alls: “the abolition of all class distinctions, of all the production relations on which those class distinctions rest, of all the social relations that correspond to those production relations, and the revolutionization of all the ideas that correspond to those social relations.” [back]