Interview with Revolution Club Members in Cleveland:
Getting The Message to the People in the Projects
July 15, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Sunsara Taylor interviewed two Revolution Club members who have been in Cleveland in advance of the Republican National Convention. The following is from a rush transcript of the interview.
Sunsara Taylor: The Revolution Club is mobilizing people from around the country to be in Cleveland, Ohio this week to stand up against and protest the Republican National Convention. And then to roll into Philly where the Democratic National Convention is taking place—in both places, to really bring alive: America Was NEVER Great—We Need to Overthrow This System. They’re organizing people for an actual revolution at the soonest possible time, really wielding and bringing people forward around the Message from the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party. And they’re leading people to stand up and fight against all the crimes of this system right now, getting organized and bringing revolution into this in the eyes of the world. So, a few people with the Revolution Club—more and more people are coming in every day, volunteers with the Revolution Club—came early and have been out in the neighborhoods. We wanted to talk with them about what their experience has been taking out the revolution and what the mood of the people is. Why don’t you guys tell us what that’s been like.
Revolution Club in Cleveland
Revolution Club Member 1 (RC1): Well there are projects all over Cleveland, and we’ve been out in a few of them—marching through the projects as an organized, disciplined force, the Revolution Club. Calling out this system, calling out the lie. Donald Trump is talking about “Make America great again.” We’re straight up saying: America was NEVER great! And this system needs to be overthrown. And we are getting organized to overthrow the system at the soonest possible time.
And when we’ve been marching through these neighborhoods, people turn—it’s catching people’s attention. When we start agitating, we’re saying, we’re asking: “Was America great when they kidnapped Africans and dragged them in slave chains here? Was America great when they carried out genocide against the Native peoples? When they waged war against Mexico and stole half the land? When they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands? When they colonized the Philippines and Hawai'i?” And we’re calling out the system that would give rise to someone like Donald Trump—that fascist, misogynous, white-supremacist pig—on the one hand; and on the other hand, a war criminal like Hillary Clinton.
ST: When you ask, “Was America ever great?,” what’s the response been?
RC1: Well a number of people actually have been chanting along with us, “Hell no, America wasn’t great then!” And people tell us about the conditions of poverty and hunger that actually exist, and the jobs that are gone from Cleveland, and the way that people have to hustle just to survive.
ST: [to the other member] Do you want to add anything about the response?
Revolution Club Member 2 (RC2): One of the things going through these projects—they’re very desolate--there are not that many people out and around. So whenever we do find pockets of people, we make sure to actually stop and give our full agitational force. At first it was a lot of little kids from the neighborhood coming around us. And at other times people are, as he was saying, jumping in and start chanting with us, and marching with us. And before we knew it, we’d get pockets of people—they’re coming out from their balconies and they’re responding to things we’ve been saying. There have been periods of times when we’ve been able to bring, like, well over a dozen people together—all different ages, all different ways of life or whatnot—and really listening in and tuning in and wanting to know more right on the spot, and get with us right on the spot. That’s been very, very, very different and important. And because of both the times we’re living in but also because we’ve been going straight up with revolution and BA’s leadership, and that’s connecting in very different ways, and that’s important to talk about.
People in the Projects Organize a Fund-raising Barbecue
ST: You guys had a fund raising barbecue, which some of the masses that you met in the projects organized. Maybe you could start by saying how that came to be. What made this young woman and some of the others who helped with this barbecue want to do this? And then we’ll talk about what happened.
RC2: As I was describing, we’re going through some of these courtyards, and we stopped at one of these courtyards. Coincidentally, two cops came out of one of the buildings. So we went at, what’s the role of the police under this system? And Bob Avakian’s quote on that [BAsics 1:24]. Then we drew this out through agitation to—this is America. America’s never been great. Then we went on to talk about the role of America in the world. And we talked about how we’re organizing people today to get with this revolution—and that we’re fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution. And how we’re heading straight into the teeth of this system—to the conventions. We stood there in formation and we had all these kids come together with us as well as these pigs were leaving the neighborhood. People started rallying up, agitating and feeling what we were saying.
Listen HEREWe broke up and went to talk to people to come out. And these two young women, just hanging out on the porch, on the spot they were like, “I want to get with this.” We played them the new audio clip from BA on elections. And on a basic level, they said: He’s saying that the very fact that they’re putting Trump up for election means that this whole system is fucked! You know, she got the essence of that. We started walking through what the Revolution Club was going to be doing at the conventions—marching out as a crew with our BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! T-shirts on. And she really connected with that and wanted to be a part of that in whatever way and whatever form. So we were walking through how we’re going to have these uniforms on, and she was like, “Oh, I want a shirt like that. And I want other people to get a shirt like this. And I want to be about the revolution.”
So we walked it through. How do we get shirts to people? How do people actually join up with the crew? And we’re saying, we should fund raise money to actually get people who don’t have the funds to be able to get a shirt. And she was thinking really big—she was thinking we can rent out a place and we can bring all sorts of people and we can make a flyer. And those were all really important ideas, but we also wanted to hone in that we’re a couple of days away, so let’s act on what we can bring together. We made a very basic plan. We said, OK, we’ll touch base tomorrow. She wanted to call around some friends and other people, which she did. She called around family members, neighbors, to say, “Look, I want to bring this together and I want people to get this shirt.”
RC1: When we did the agitation, people all around this little courtyard were cheering. And people came up to us afterward and said, that was so great that the pigs have been driven out by the agitation. We were tapping into the raw anger that people feel about how the police treat them every single day: What happened to Tamir Rice. What happened to Melissa Williams and Timothy Russell, who got shot 137 times, the last 15 when a cop climbed up on top of their car. All this is very deeply felt in these projects.
ST: You were going to say about who came together to help make this happen.
RC1: There were the two cousins who were the main ones who actually went grocery shopping. And then were was a guy next door that loaned his table. There was another guy on the other side who loaned the barbecue. We bought the charcoal. We got hot dogs, hamburgers, drinks, chicken. They made a sign that said “Revolutionary” with all the prices on it. We made another sign to let everyone know what it was about, which said “America Was Never Great. We Need to Overthrow This System.” And that this is a fundraiser for the Revolution Club at the protests against Trump and the whole system, when it comes to town.
ST: And some of the people you had met recently, they had put on the BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! shirt with you for the barbecue.
RC1: Yeah, they put on the shirt. They cooked the food. They introduced us to their friends and neighbors. Some of us went around the neighborhood telling people about it. Some of the kids went and told all the other kids on the basketball court and the swimming pool, that we had cold drinks—it was a hot day.
“When you guys make your new country…we should do a revolutionary festival”
ST: They were telling them about the revolution…even the kids were, right?
RC1: Yeah, yeah. In fact there was one kid who has been following us around for the last week in the projects, who came up and told us that he remembered all of our names. He asked us—he had two questions. The first was, he asked us if Black cops kill Black people. And we told him, yeah, that happens all the time—that it doesn’t matter, Black cops, white cops, green cops, purple cops, they all act like pigs and oppress Black people and other people. He said, “That’s madness. They’re killing their own people. That’s madness.” This is a nine-year-old kid.
And then he said, “When you guys make your new country, I think we should do a revolutionary festival.” This is all his words. “I think we should do a revolutionary festival, with a BIG bouncy house and roller coasters. Kids can come anytime they want. There’s gonna be food.” I thought it was really interesting that he understood that we were talking about a new country, you know. We’ve been saying “America was never great” and talking about all the crimes of America and saying we’re fighting for a revolution to bring about the New Socialist Republic in North America. There was something about that that he got, you know, and had a whole vision of a society he would like to live in. We want to ask him to draw a picture of this revolutionary festival the next time we see him.
Wrangling Over the Revolutionary Points of Attention
ST: One of the other things interesting about this was, you had a sense of the outrage and tapping into the outrage—and this has been a week that that’s really come to the surface after these outrageous police murders down in Baton Rouge and then in Minnesota and people rising up against this. I’m sure with all that’s happening here, with Tamir Rice like you were saying, the pig Brelo and 137 shots—all of this is seething beneath the surface. So that’s coming out and that’s very important. But you were also telling me, and I think your story reflects this, some sense of, we’re going for something better, too. And we have a sense of that, we have a vision of that, a leadership for that. I know you’ve been playing a lot of the BA clips for people. But you were telling me also, just on these new social relations and what kind of world we’re fighting for, a little bit of interaction about going to the Revolution Club’s Points of Attention, and some of the questions around even some of the music that was being played…why don’t you talk about that.
RC2: Yeah, as described, everybody was trying to throw in to actually make the fund raiser happen, right? And so somebody put on their music. At first it was OK. And then it got into a lot of the degrading rap music and rap culture, and so it had to stop. And I drew actually from the celebration on the occasion of the publication of BAsics (that took place in Harlem, NYC, in April 2011), from somebody who said there that, there’s a lot of good beats and all that, but then you come out of it feeling very degraded because of the lyrics and the content is so degrading and objectifying and sometimes outright abusive towards women. So I basically related this to the person who had their music playing. And they listened to me and they thought about it, and said, “You’re right, this is bad, very horrible music in what it’s saying…”
ST: This was a young woman, or…
RC2: A young woman. So then what she did is, she changed the music and she put on all these love songs [laughs]. This was her way of kind of saying: OK, I hear that and I want to be about something different, I want to promote something different. And I think that was how we were struggling, talking through the whole fundraiser. A whole different way of being and living and existing, I thought, was a big part of what was attracting them to this revolution.
RC1: Also, one of the friends came by and started talking about his mom—or I think it might have been his grandmother—who had 16 kids. So I said something about, that’s why women need to be able to have the right to abortion and birth control, and that this right is being taken away from women all across the country. And the two cousins, young women, who made this barbecue happen just started going on: no one’s gonna force me to have a kid I don’t want! They were very defiant about that. So we were bringing in a whole other dimension of what this revolution is about and what needs to be unleashed amongst women and others for this revolution to happen.
It is really true that these Points of Attention have been setting whole new standards in these neighborhoods. We’ve been reading them with people, and people see them and see what they agree with and sometimes what they disagree with. There was one young guy—very radical in a lot of ways, and he read very seriously through all six Points of Attention, and said: I like all of this except I have two disagreements. One is about homosexuality, and the other is about Point 6, that “at this stage we do not initiate violence.” We struggled with him about both. Actually, he changed his tune on both of them.
In terms of violence, what he was actually talking about was the need for self-defense, which we actually clarified was different from initiating violence. And we also explained that we were serious about winning this revolution, and what kind of conditions are necessary to actually win.
And then the other point about homosexuality, we really unpacked that… He was actually saying, “I agree with the point about women shouldn’t be treated as less than, but I think homosexuality is part of the genocide against Black people.” Because gay people supposedly can’t have children, is how he was looking at it. So we unpacked what is the real genocide that’s happening to Black people—and how fighting against the oppression of gay people is actually part of the revolution that we need to get rid of all of this oppression. That gay people are human beings and equals like anyone else, as a basic point. And the idea that LBGT people are “sinful” or “unnatural” or whatever, that they should be stoned to death—those ideas all come from the same traditional patriarchal ways of thinking and relating that says women should be silent and obedient, and all the rest of the submission and obedience and slavery that’s concentrated in the Bible and other traditional ways of thinking.
At one point the cousins introduced us to one of their neighbors who came by, a young guy, who told me, “Some people say that all white people hate us, that none of them care about what happens to us, none of them care about police brutality. But I don’t think that’s true.” I asked him if he had seen the movie Free State of Jones. He had, and we sort of talked about this as an example of white people and Black people coming together to fight against oppression.
Connecting Bob Avakian with the People
People are getting a sense that the Revolution Club does actually represent something really different. And in particular, the role of putting Bob Avakian and his clips directly in front of people. What has so much resonated with people is exactly what’s said in the second resolution of the Six Resolutions from the RCP Central Committee about the rare combination of a deep theoretical understanding, a deep analysis of the system and a vision of a whole different society, along with the visceral and deep hatred for oppression, and deep connection that he has with oppressed people, in the sense of all this oppression is intolerable. Why do these cops get away with murder over and over and over again? Why are they never punished? You can see people nodding along and saying “Yes.” People say, “I’ve never heard a white person speak like this.” “He really speaks my language.” In particular we’ve been using the clip from the Dialogue [between Bob Avakian and Cornel West on religion and revolution] and “BA Through the Years.” The whole thing about trying to be a big dog in a dog-eat-dog world—people laugh, people nod, people get exactly what he’s talking about. Because they live in it, they see it all around—at the same time as he gives you a vision of a world beyond the dog-eat-dog.
And the seriousness of being in uniform, and having a leadership that is on that level, you know? Like the Message from the RCP says, this is a BIG strength for the revolution. The system is powerful but it’s not all-powerful. And a revolutionary leadership that has this passion for it and this understanding of what are the cracks in the system that we can hammer at to bring this system down. What is on the other side of that wall?
ST: Do you want to say anything more?
RC1: We’re not done about the barbecue. At one point there was a whole bunch of gun shots, like about 100 yards away. We were still doing the barbecue, and everyone started running. And the cousins grabbed us and…what did they say?...
RC2: The police are gonna come in here, and they know what you represent, and right now is not the time to go down like this, something along those lines.
RC1: They grabbed me by my arm [laughs] and put us inside, you know. And we were also making clear: if they use this shooting as an excuse to fuck with people around here, we want to be part of standing up against that. So as we left, we told them to call us if they do any raids, if they come back here messing with people. We also had to talk with them because one of them was saying, this is why I don’t want to live around here, and you sort of start to get demoralized about what we’re trying to do, right? We’re trying to reach these same people that are actually caught up in this. So we had to talk to them about, this is exactly why we need this revolution. You have millions of people who are caught up…who this system encourages to kill each other, and then kills them on top of that. People need to stop fighting each other and start fighting the damn system that put them in these conditions in the first place. But it’s not going to happen by blaming the people. It’s not going to happen by hating on the people. It’s only going to happen by getting people to start to understand why they’re in the situation and who their real enemy is, and start uniting to fight against that. And we were showing people the picture that was on revcom.us of the Bloods and Crips in Omaha with their bandanas together.
And this barbecue had a whole spirit of, we’re getting organized to actually take this message down to the RNC. Get the T-shirt so that you can be part of the Revolution Club going to be part of the protest, marching from the projects down there. And people were asking each other: Are you going to be there? Are you going to get your T-shirt?
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