Some thoughts from people in New York doing phone banking on the message and call from the RCP "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have"
In the phone banking we found that quite a few people who got the statement at the July 14 Carl Dix/Cornel West program had not yet read it. Our experience has been that to get people to engage this actually takes work and does not happen spontaneously. When we called people back we encouraged them to read it—and we read parts of it over the phone on the spot—several of them really liked it and were particularly struck by what the statement had to say about the youth and off of this a few of them came to the Raymond Lotta program, "Why Everything You've Been Told About Communism is Wrong, or Why the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions Were Breakthroughs in Human Emancipation" and have hooked up with the youth volunteers. From people being very busy, to not reading long text over the internet (where even the statement is considered long), to going up against a priori assumptions people have as to what they think will be in the statement (clouded by the predominant narrative and verdict that revolution and communism is neither possible nor desirable) it actually takes work to connect and get people to engage the statement. Where we have sat and read the statement with the basic masses this has been a very important method of getting people to engage and even where this has gone on in full—it's also taken going back into sections of this and drawing out what people think.
