Take the Revolution onto the Campus
March 20, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From Boston to LA, from Florida to Wisconsin to DC and beyond... some fresher breezes are beginning to blow on campuses.
Building for the premier showing of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! on campus, February 2013.
Now is the time to take the revolution—and to take REVOLUTION—onto these campuses.
Keep it simple—radically simple. Keep a stash of Revolution newspapers, quote cards from BAsics, and palm cards for the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION–NOTHING LESS! Keep flyers to post. When you have an hour or so to spare, go on to the campus near you and get these out—get them to individuals, and leave them around in places where people can see them. Go to organizations which are doing things on campus and get them some of these materials. Many of the students in these organizations—and the organizations as a whole—can be won to take up BA Everywhere and the fight to Stop Mass Incarceration and to join with Stop Patriarchy, with its focus now on defending the right to abortion. Discuss this with them.
Do NOT wait for group outings to be organized. Organized forays with a bunch of people are great, but if we only go onto campuses when we have a large crew, then we won’t really make enough headway. Just grab any time you can over these next two months to go onto campuses, or around campuses if they are locked down, and get these materials out. When you can, make announcements and broadly distribute Revolution in classes and especially the special issue You Don't Know What You Think You "Know" About… The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future, and then talk with people when they exit their classes.
Then, yes, of course, be part of organizing special efforts—and let these two forms work together.
Look on bulletin boards for programs that sound interesting and go to those. Seek out budding movements of resistance. And post your materials when you can on these bulletin boards. Students have been acting on, or planning to act on, the environment; racism and mass incarceration and the detention of immigrants; the oppression of women; against the vicious attacks on Palestinians; and other questions, and beginning to take significant risks. Take the revolution to them. Find out what they are thinking. If you go to a public event, or a meeting, and feel confident speaking from the floor, great. If you don’t, just get out the materials, including Revolution newspaper, and see if you can talk with individuals. And if all you have time for is getting a palm card on each chair before a program starts, well... that, too, counts.
Coordinate your materials with the focuses of the month. Right now, you should be emphasizing the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION–NOTHING LESS! and the fund raising going on around that—and this paper will help you in this. For the first week of April, take the special issue on the history and future of communism—and spread the flyers which we’ll be posting soon letting people know about this special issue, posting them all over. Then the middle of April take the materials that relate to Earth Day, which will be a focus of BA Everywhere that month. And be sure to distribute palm cards with the QR code for the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal).
Bring BA and REVOLUTION to everything going on—including to events that will be going on supporting the right to abortion on and leading up to April 11-12 and events and public meetings against mass incarceration. But there is more—if students are acting around Palestine, bring the special Revolution issue The Case of Israel: Bastion of Enlightenment or Enforcer for Imperialism? along with other material.
Talk with students, professors and people who work on the campus! Take some time to talk with people about how they see the world. Go up to people, individuals and in groups, and ask them if they have 10 or 15 minutes to tell you what they think. Learn. And don’t just go to the social science departments—get out into the natural sciences and the humanities!
Have fun—and let revcom.us know what you are learning! (Send email to revolution.reports@yahoo.com)
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