Cornel West Interviews Bob
Avakian on PRI Smiley & West radio, October 2012
Bob Avakian Interview by
Michael Slate — Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Video Advertising the March 16th Premiere at Magic Johnson AMC, New York City
“Yes, this is a film, but that is not its
essence. This is a daring, substantive,
scientific summoning to revolution. 6+ hours
that can change how you see the world and what you
do with the rest of your life. Is this
hype? No.”
—From one of the filmmakers
See clip "What to the slave is your fourth of July? From the past to the present." from Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, a Film of a Talk by Bob Avakian in 2003
Updated March 24, 2013
Building, Learning, Transforming | Snapshots
Why go to this film premiere? Simply: It's by far the most important thing people could be doing that day–it's dealing with the most important thing there could be–because it's about the real possibility of bringing into being a radically different world, where all this madness, all the oppression and injustice, all the abuse and degradation that is so much a part of life now, would be done away with. If anybody can think of anything more important than that–let's hear it!
"My dear brother Bob Avakian... is the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party.... He is one of the few coming out of the 60's who never sold out, he never caved in, he never gave up, held on to his forging of a rigorous, scientific analysis of the objective realities that are driven by a revolutionary love – because he has such a deep love for poor people, oppressed people, all around the world. Whether you agree or disagree with our brother, one thing you cannot deny: that he is the real thing. No doubt about it."
–Cornel West, introducing his
interview with Bob Avakian
on the Smiley & West radio show
(October 5, 2012)
"Those this system has cast off, those it has treated as less than human, can be the backbone and driving force of a fight not only to end their own oppression, but to finally end all oppression, and emancipate all of humanity."
—From this film, BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS
“Yes, this is a film, but that is not its essence. This is a daring, substantive, scientific summoning to revolution. 6+ hours that can change how you see the world and what you do with the rest of your life. Is this hype? No.”
—From one of the filmmakers
A point of orientation—and this is something where clarity is important...
Rather than avoiding (or being defensive) we need to be assertively and boldly—and, in a real sense, positively—putting forward the fact that BA is a "contended question"...that a lot of people who find out what he is all about really like him and what he stands for, and then there are people who really hate him, fundamentally because of what he stands for.
February 10, 2013. If humanity is going to fight its way out of this horrific nightmare and create a world where human beings can rise to their full potential and truly flourish, it will be because of the work and leadership of Bob Avakian. And it will be because people—beginning with YOU—get into this work, get with this leadership, and fight for others to do the same.
In March, a new film of a major
speech given by Bob Avakian in the fall of 2012
will premiere. This film can make a world of
difference in a world that needs nothing more
than to be radically different. Whether that
happens depends on us.
Read more
March 10, 2013
by Raymond Lotta
I recently had some discussions with a few professors about the March 16 premiere of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS. I thought it would be helpful to sum up three lessons.
The first and most important has to do with adhering to the basic or "core orientation" that should be guiding us in going out to people. I am speaking of the vital paragraph "Why Go to This Film Premiere?" This really has to set the terms and the tone of our encounters with people. I say this because there is a tendency to get pulled away and, really more a temptation to, get drawn into all kinds of discussion and back-and-forth that actually cut against the whole point of that paragraph.
October
7, 2012. This sharp polemic, by two young
revolutionaries, is very important in the coming
weeks as people take out word about the film of
BA's new talk.
Read more
March 8, 2013
Karl Marx once wrote that in the future communist society it will be as difficult to imagine owning a piece of land as it is today to picture owning a human being.
The same principle applies to the
rest of the many horrors today seem to
constitute the "natural order of things." It
will be difficult for people to fathom how it
ever seemed acceptable to live in a world where
millions of children died each year from
preventable disease, where technology and
innovation were utilized not to solve world
hunger but to create and unleash arsenals of
mass destruction, or where ideas—even new
understandings of how to cure epidemic
diseases—were considered "private property" and
held back unless someone could profit off them.
Read
more
March 8, 2013
Many people are working very hard
to make the nationwide premieres of BA
Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! major
successes. When and as we do this, there are
sometimes simple ways to multiply our efforts
that we may not see. We need to ask: where are
the possible synergies of different efforts,
where are the possible sources of dynamism, that
we may be overlooking? And how do we do better
at opening a number of different doors into this
movement so that people can find ways to make
their contributions count?
Read
more
March
2, 2013. On this planet today, there are
no questions that are more important—and no
answers that are more thoroughgoing—than what is
spoken to in BA Speaks:
REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! And
there is no person more filled with
contempt for the powers-that-be and the horrific
order they trumpet and enforce—nor more filled
with scientific confidence in the potential of
masses of people to change all that—than Bob
Avakian, the Chairman of the Revolutionary
Communist Party, USA.
Read
more.
February
28, 2013. I think it would be very good
to develop some tags—short sharp formulations
that go along with some of our promotional
materials—that convey clearing one day to
come together with others in theaters around
the country to engage the most pressing
questions of our time as spoken to by the
leader who has made possible a whole new world.
Read
more
February
18, 2013. There are four weeks until the
premiere of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING
LESS! The premieres of this film
are crucially important; but we have to conceive
of them as, and make them be part of, something
larger. The process of building for and then
showing this film has to put revolution on the
map in society in a big way and go a lot further
in making BA a household word.
Read more
March 14, 2013
Wednesday, March 13, a press conference was held under a huge colorful billboard for BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! on Crenshaw Blvd in Los Angeles. It was in protest of the LAPD's attempt to forcibly prevent people from publicizing the premiere of the film in the area.
March 12, 2013
A couple weeks ago we introduced a little DVD player at the front counter at Revolution Books. Something new began to happen.
March 12, 2013
Bob Avakian and his work are getting more into the political discourse as revolutionaries are going out in the world engaging and struggling with a wide array of people about BA and revolution, while building for the premiere of the film: “BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
March 10, 2013
From a reader:
It is of great importance that we win many
people to actually attend the film BA
Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! and
that we do so on the right basis!
March 10, 2013
From a reader:
A couple of us went into a classroom to
promote the premier of BA Speaks:
REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! We made a
presentation aimed at making the point that the
most important thing these students could do was
clear the day and be in the house for that
premier.
March 8, 2013
This post should be seen as supplemental to yesterday's very important post "Key Themes and Methods in Fighting Through to Successful Premieres" (below).
More on three key points from that post, and two new points:
Observations and Thoughts on Building for the Film Premiere:
March 6, 2013
Here are some observations and thoughts on two main themes off of being out this last weekend to promote, build for and get people to come to the film premiere BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
March 8, 2013
"BA just grabbed me and dragged me in," this was one of the first comments after nearly a dozen of us finished watching the first two hours of the rough cut of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION— NOTHING LESS! "He gives so much history to everything he is talking about. Even if you are new to this movement you know what he is talking about because he makes it really clear."
March 3, 2013
From a Reader
In 2009, there was a campus speaking tour by Raymond Lotta entitled "Everything You Have Been Told About Communism Is Wrong! Capitalism Is a Failure, Revolution Is the Solution." And at the University of Chicago, this tour actually hit like a storm. This event and the work building up to it gave a glimmer of what it is like when we begin to crack open the atmosphere.
February 27, 2013
A plan, a framework, to work in a unified way.
February 27, 2013.
by Sunsara Taylor
One year ago yesterday, Trayvon Martin was still alive and visiting his father in Sanford, Florida. A little after 7 pm his life was cut short by a racist vigilante as he walked home from the corner store with his hoodie up to protect him from the rain. As millions around the world now know, George Zimmerman, the man wanna-be-cop who admitted to having killed Trayvon, was not even arrested.
February 27, 2013.
Trayvon
Martin Day, February 26, saw a hellava scene in
East Oakland!
Signs waving, horns honking, and two loud and
two determined marches in the streets—marking
the one-year anniversary of the cold-blooded
murder of Trayvon Martin, at the busiest
intersection in East Oakland.
February 22, 2013.
Many hundreds streamed in to hear Michelle Alexander speak on “The New Jim Crow” at a major university.
February 17, 2013.
Editor's note: Two correspondences in this issue of Revolution give a living picture of important advances to learn from, and advance off of in making the premiere of the film of a major talk, BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! a giant step forward in building a movement for revolution.
February 19, 2013.
In being part of the work to build for the nationwide premiere of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, I have been thinking a lot about what Bob Avakian modeled in this talk (I am among those who had the incredible experience of previewing this film) and striving to apply that. In that light, I want to share some experience—particularly some experience of challenging straight up to the youth from among the most oppressed to get with this revolution, including many who at first usually ignore or brush us off.
February 24, 2013.
Before heading out to an elite campus to build for the nationwide premiere of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! our team read and had a quick discussion of the posting "Stepping To and Really Challenging the Youth."
February 5, 2013
“What’s the problem? THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM! What’s the solution? REVOLUTION!” In a busy South Central L.A. shopping district this weekend, the Revolution hit the scene in a new way, arriving with a crew marching the four corners of a large intersection determined, tight, and on a mission with the message and title of the film of Bob Avakian’s new talk: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
February 17, 2013.
It was a busy afternoon at a major college in a big city, a lot of students from the bottom of society who've grown up in projects or immigrant communities. Word spread through the cafeteria as a flier went out that read "REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!" letting people know about the upcoming premiere of the new talk by Bob Avakian. We challenged people that Obama has been worse than Bush and called on them to listen to the new interview with Bob Avakian on The Michael Slate Show.
February 17, 2013.
Interview with two members of the NYC Revolution Club.
February 2013—Los Angeles, CA
February 2013 - at a major
university
The following are reports of significant experiences, large or small, in the run-up to the premieres. These are not put here as models; instead, people should look at these as field reports—raw and unfiltered, not necessarily “correct” or on-target in every aspect, but worth sifting and mining for lessons. Keep sending!
March 15, 2013
These recent trips inside the class rooms with the orientation of “REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!” have really been an interesting experience. The students are very receptive when it comes to hearing about injustices but then there is the question of what we are going to do about it and what is your life going to be about.
March 13, 2012
3/13/13: For the second night in a row on Tuesday, over a hundred people rallied and marched through East Flatbush, angry and outraged over the murder of 16-year-old Kimani “Kiki” Gray at the hands of undercover NYPD pigs.
March 12, 2012
A crew of us went from Houston to San Antonio for the annual International Women's Day (IWD) march.
Here's what we're announcing in classes at UC Berkeley (you can do a minute or two before class starts).
An important and significant thing from that day is that masses did join in with us, L from the Bronx, the two young guys from the projects, as well as S who is an African-American guy in his early 30s who lives in the projects ...
11 students have so far bought their tickets at the community college that we have been going out to. After some initial outings where we had a team of 4 or 5 people we were able to organize a revolution club that has made its first big project bringing at least 20 students from the school to the premiere.
(Translated from Spanish)
A group of friends got together to watch the rough cut of the film of the new talk by BA, BA speaks: REVOLUTION — NOTHING LESS! And we were really lucky to be able to see it before the premiere.
_____ was again very immersed in viewing the film, and again quite animated afterwards. He was up and pacing about, saying that he thought that there were “3 points; what students need to encounter before they decide to work on Wall Street when they are young enough to make crucial choices”...
At one high school alone, by the end of next week we'll have made announcements or had class discussions (for the whole class) in something like 20 or more classes....
Usually at work around events I'd talk to people as individuals. This time I put up a poster about the Trayvon protests and made an announcement inviting people to come to the protest and wear hoodies to work.
Most recently (yesterday) we did somewhat of a combination of street-team and concentrating at a Whole Foods-type market in town.
Many people have responded positively and taken flyers and gotten copies of the Cornel West interview with BA to listen to. And like we reported before, right on the spot, when we have gone out in a big way, we have called on people to come to a meeting of the Revolution Club that same afternoon and people have come and started to work together.
On a sunny Saturday, we set up literature tables in a Latino district market plaza. With plenty of displays about the film and photo displays with BAsics quotes, we got on the bullhorn in Spanish and English, using the editorial (Revolution #294) as a guideline.
Our plan for the weekend was to make a visual presence of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! in a neighborhood where we've been doing a lot of work.
Our social media team here in Chicago is planning on sending emails to everyone who signs up for the film premiere on our Facebook event, urging them to get tickets and asking them to invite their friends on FB to the event there. We will also email people we know who were invited and urge them to "join" the FB event, get tickets and invite their friends. We plan to adapt the emails you post here on revcom.us for that purpose. This approach has worked in relation to other events to turn FB "joins" into really getting tickets and COMING to the event.
We just got word back from the person from Can TV Cable station: The BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! trailer for Chicago has been accepted at CAN-TV and they will start cablecasting it Monday at the latest. He will try to get some specific times to me then so we can be on the lookout for it. I wanted people to know in case cable stations in other cities where we are showing the film might try and get it on cable TV in their area.
I think we should have all-day phone banking with runners. On Saturday we can have a team of people phone calling, and a team of runners in Harlem. When we sell a ticket people can go deliver it. All the people that are close to getting a ticket we can say – "get your money together, give us your number, and someone will deliver it on Sunday."
At a local community college people organizing for the premiere figured out things for students and teachers to do...