Last fall Sunsara Taylor and I had the extraordinary opportunity to interview Bob Avakian on The RNL Show. These interviews are available at YouTube/therevcoms.

As an article that’s on our website, revcom.us observed: “What is concentrated in these interviews is objectively a game-changer: there simply is no one and nothing else like this, and any decent, honest and intellectually curious person who cares about the state of the world and watches this will be transformed....”

Bob Avakian (BA) goes at so many different urgent questions, unrehearsed, with science, passion and so much clarity. He wields science—applying the scientific method and approach of the new communism to solving the excruciatingly and seemingly unsolvable problems confronting all of humanity. He breaks down and brings alive the problem in the system we live under that’s at the root of all that we face, from the danger of nuclear war to what this system does to Black and Brown youth…. The scope of these talks is nothing less than the world.

BA goes at these questions like nobody else:

He speaks to and challenges the youth brought up in a vicious world who learn to mimic the big-time gangsters who run this country with tragic and heartbreaking consequences...

He speaks of the import of beauty in the natural world, and in art—why to appreciate Shakespeare as well as works of art from around the world...

This comes alive in funny childhood and high school memories with deep lessons for today...

He doesn’t shirk from the harsh reality that is bearing down on us with the future hanging in the balance as the system of capitalism-imperialism takes us to the edge of nuclear annihilation and climate catastrophe... he breaks down the workings of the system so vividly and clearly that at one and the same time—someone without much education can get it, and someone with a lot of schooling is compelled to confront the reality that it is the system at the root of what we face today.

Most of all, The BA Interviews bring that we don’t have to put up with ANY OF THIS. A radically different and far better world through a real revolution to overthrow this system is possible. Speaking particularly of the heightened danger of nuclear war, BA says: “We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.” By the time you get to the end of these three interviews, you feel this possibility—even if you never considered it before.

A young person who watched the interviews and is now working with a Revolution Club minced no words to say that the BA Interviews are an “intervention” in this rare time when the future hangs in balance, a moment when revolution is possible. The interviews, she said, is why "I’m here."

Let me be equally direct. When we make the case on this show that the roadmap for this moment is one of either a truly terrible future—even existential—OR, something truly emancipating. That latter future, the future where we could get beyond all the degradation, exploitation, oppression, war and destruction, requires making revolution. The revolution requires you and millions more. And, the invitation, the introduction, the feeling and the substance of the future, the society, and what the world really could be is what these interviews bring.

For this reason, there is a need for tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands to watch these interviews now. NOW. This requires sharp, persistent struggle against all the ways of thinking that hold people back. What BA does in the interviews, what we do on this show is take off the blinders, expose the reality behind the façade, strip away the mirror of the me, me, me, that is embedded in the cell phone. Take what BA brings, what we bring with this show, and be part of shaking and waking people up—provoke, challenge, and inspire people to see that how they are thinking about things is not how things actually are: America is not the good guys… When the police murder our youth over and over again, they are doing their job; thinking that you have your “own reality” is ridiculous; reality is reality. There is no savior from heaven or the Democratic Party to come save you…. We face a system. It hasn’t been forever and need not be forever. Watch these interviews with Bob Avakian and feel it and come to know what could be.

We have said that these interviews are full of heart and soul and hard core for revolution. Over the last several weeks on The RNL Show we have shown parts of the interviews on war, on abortion, on the youth, on the liberation of women and the emancipation of all humanity. Today we want to show the heart and soul of BA and what that says about the kind of revolution he is leading, the kind of movement that we are building, the kind of people that all of us strive to be today and really could be in a radically new society.

Closing note from Andy Zee: What followed this introduction is the last question of the first interview with Bob Avakian on why it is necessary to have a poetic spirit in leading a movement for an actual revolution. If you haven’t seen this, watch now.