Intervening with BEB at the Bernie Sanders kickoff rally in Brooklyn

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

New York City Revolution Club went out to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign kickoff rally in Brooklyn on Saturday morning, March 2. Thousands of people, including many students and young people, lined up for hours to get in, excited to hear their progressive democratic socialist candidate talk about “healthcare for all,” tuition-free college, and taxing Wall Street to fund all this. We showed up with a big BEB poster (as featured on the revcom website) which has the faces of current Democratic Party candidates, including Bernie, alongside a picture of Trump and Pence with the letters BEB across each picture. A thousand flyers of this same graphic were distributed down the line while people waited to get in. This created a buzz going into and at the rally. Also, some of us were able to get onto the bleachers that back-dropped Bernie Sanders and we held up signs that had BEB taped over Bernie’s official rally poster. (The organizers had the police escort us off the stage after a while but the BEB signs and people wearing revcom T-shirts back-dropped  Bernie for a whole chunk of his speech.)

After the rally ended, shit just broke loose! Everyone passing by was demanding to know “What is BEB?” Many were upset that Bernie’s (or Ocasio-Cortez’s) picture was next to others like Trump and Pence. Some people tried grabbing the big posters and bending them. Others were yelling and screaming, in the dark about what could all these politicians possibly have in common? We challenged people to take a guess? (Check out the short video on this page that gives a flavor of this). After a little while, more and more people were not just provoked but challenged to think through, what could these different politicians all possibly have in common, and actual attempts at answering: what the hell does BEB stand for?

In addition, the NYC Rev Club wrote a short polemic hitting at some of the key ways that Bernie is playing people. (Just over 900 of these got out to the crowd as well.) It was important to have been at the rally because the very people who were there are people who care about and want to see an end to one or several of what we call the “5 STOPS” (deep and defining contradictions of the system for which they have no solution that’s in the interest of humanity) but the direction they are being led in, to get behind Bernie and the Democratic Party, is doing a great deal of harm and this needs to be challenged. The so-called “democratic socialist” solutions are no solution and so many who would like to see a better world are being funneled and fooled back into the embrace of the same system of capitalism-imperialism that’s the source of all this oppression and exploitation and madness. The reality is: This system cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown!

 

Spread on social media