Drawing in a New Wave of People for Revolution

On May 2, in New York City, 60 people attended an open house sponsored by Revolution newspaper. The day kicked off with a presentation by Revolution writer Li Onesto: “The people need a revolution as soon as possible—and we need a revolutionary movement right now. Not somewhere down the line, but now…. Revolution shows WHAT is happening, WHY it’s happening, and HOW a whole other world is possible. It lays bare the worthlessness of this system—and what we need to do to get rid of it. It creates public opinion...to seize power.”

With copies in hand of the “Three Main Points” from Bob Avakian that are in every issue of this paper (p. 2), 60 people grabbed sandwiches and divided into working groups that took up every aspect of making this paper happen—including proofreading and fact-checking, distribution, fund-raising, visualizing the voice (the graphic layout and design of the paper), the website, reporting and, Spanish translation.

Truth in Preparation for Revolution

“We weren’t just dotting i’s and crossing t’s, we were talking philosophy!” So exclaimed a young man who attended the proofreading and fact-checking workshop. An activist around political prisoners added, “There were a lot more varied opinions here than I’d thought. The workshop I was in, about proofreading and fact-checking, got into a very heavy discussion about objective truth.”

For example, one woman in the working group raised: “I don’t see how humans can claim to speak the truth.” “But,” she added, “it’s just admirable that one should try to tell the truth, and if communists are telling the truth to the best of their ability, that’s something admirable. The New York Times is not doing the job! And my second thing is, I feel like in the world, you can’t say anything about Israel, or they’ll say you’re anti-Semitic. You can’t say anything about communism, you know—they’ll make mincemeat out of you.”

The activist around political prisoners told Revolution, “There were a lot of opinions about it, and disagreements and so forth, but at the end, as we were winding down, I think people started to understand what that is, objective truth. I knew that that point was very, very important—objective truth. Whether you see it in terms of a good fact or a bad fact, there’s really no such a thing as a bad fact. Fact is fact, and truth is truth, and that’s it. If you’re gonna build a serious movement towards revolution, you need to come from a point of truth. I’m gonna stay with the proofreading and fact-checking, I think that will be very interesting, and very important.”

Drawing in a New Wave

In the weeks leading up to the conference, volunteers with Revolution reached out to college students in the midst of finals, and a very contradictory and complex atmosphere on campuses. One student who came to the open house talked to Revolution about some of the things she confronts: “The way academia has been structured has not been to raise these very important questions, so there’s this really big disconnect between what’s happening politically in this country and the egregiousness of this system. A lot of student lists are focusing on very particular issues. Like they’re focusing on Palestine. But they’re not having a really big discourse or analysis of implications of what’s happening between Israel and Palestine in terms of U. S. imperialism and empire being partnered. I sometimes join in on the conversation. There was one e-mail I remember, from a student who was very, very upset, and said that she wanted to locate their organizing just on Palestine, and that anything beyond that was not actually addressing what the group had originally set out to do. And this is like [a major university] student anti-war movement! And there wasn’t a really strong response like, actually, you know, this is part of an overall analysis of what’s happening in the system and not just Palestine. There is not this orientation, communism and revolution are off the table. There’s nothing that’s being put out there that’s challenging in that way—it’s not even something that’s in your consciousness.”

This student was part of the reporters working group which, after a bit of wrangling with why revolutionary communists need to do in-depth investigation into the mood and questions of the masses… in order to change things, headed off to the nearby campus of New York University. They broke into teams of two with audio recorders, and over the course of an hour or two conducted over a dozen substantial interviews with students to learn what they knew about the use of torture in the “war on terror,” the significance of the recently released torture memos, and what they knew about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as what these students thought was necessary and possible protest. The results fed into the coverage of the torture memos in Revolution issue #164, and the interviews are part of a project to take the political pulse of college students, and the results will be made public in the fall.

Through the course of the day, people attending the open house joined working groups led by veterans and others who have more recently joined in producing Revolution. Some of these working groups immediately started getting together and contributed to the production of the next issue of Revolution. Some people who came to the open house from out of town have since found ways to participate in helping to produce the paper.

The artwork, photos and graphics working group workshopped designs for upcoming covers and pictorial centerspreads. One accomplished poster artist, who was met in the course of building for the open house, came to both the reporting and graphics workshops, he was part of interviewing students, and then ended up contributing the front page artwork illustrating waterboarding for Revolution/Revolución #164 [see revcom.us/a/164/cover164-en.html].

New people brought new ideas into the open house, along with impatience to make them happen. Talking about distribution of the paper, one person said, “[The content of the newspaper] is good, it’s not bad, it’s not lacking. But what may be lacking is reaching more people…. It’s important to be attentive to where the discourse is and what words are important right now. Specifically, I think a big reactionary movement of the neo-cons in the last 35 to 40 years is still moving forward every day. ‘Communism is evil’ is something that comes into their [people on the street’s] minds, and that makes them interested. They’re interested in what for them is darkness. It’s really the light—but it’s cloaked in darkness by the reactionaries.”

A woman attending the translation working group said, “We need to broaden the reach of the paper. I learned today how to draw people into the movement, developing strategies to reach broader sections of people. Like for example, we went out to May Day [a major immigrant rights demonstration] to sell the paper. We were thinking of how we could develop creativity, to draw people towards us. Music—we could’ve had some there. You have to spark people’s curiosity. The newspaper is bringing out what things are like in the world, the system, what we’re up against, and also the possibility of revolution. The newspaper is a vehicle to do that in a much broader way. It needs to get out in the neighborhoods, in the communities of people. For example, we need to have a table out in Queens every weekend. In Queens there are posters in Spanish, but not ones that promote our material. So you need to get out your stuff in a different way.”

The New York City open house opened the doors for dozens of people to get involved in Revolution—and in fresh and creative ways to take responsibility for and contribute to the transformation of Revolution into a much more powerful and much more broadly distributed newspaper. Revolution newspaper tomorrow must be a paper which throughout the country, more fully, directly and deeply contributes to the work of hastening the motion toward, and preparing the people for, a revolutionary situation.

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