Yes, I’m going to be in New York for the screening of the special one-hour film, Selections From The Bob Avakian Interviews On The RNL Show. This will be the third big-screen showing that I will experience of this film adapted from the three interviews that Sunsara and I conducted with Bob Avakian, BA, a year ago. 

If you are in traveling distance to NYC, if you are in New York, you need to experience this leader up close, speaking from the heart and the head with passion and a scientific unpeeling of why the world doesn’t have to be the way it is. From my first two experiences in LA and Oakland, California, even as I played a key role in the editing of this special film, each time on the big screen I was moved, and I saw the audiences transformed—including people who had watched the interviews before. What accounts for this?

BA is a leader who lives and breathes that a far better way of organizing society is possible. And, with Bob Avakian, this is not just a desire, an aspiration, with no way to make it real. 

Bob Avakian is a leader who can break down for audience—from PhDs to people who never had a chance to finish school due to their conditions of life—WHY THE WORLD IS THE WAY IT IS. Why life for billions of people in the world today is a living hell. Why for millions, their lives are being shattered and snuffed out by high-tech weapons in Ukraine and Palestine unleashed by rulers seeking to advance their imperialist empires, and why so many people feel that life is getting worse and heading towards disaster. BA makes people see and feel not just the paltriness of trying to reform the system of capitalism-imperialism that we live under, but makes you see the absurdity, the impossibility of reforming it. No, we are not going to beg, vote, boycott, this system into being fair and just. This system needs to be overthrown. 

Bob Avakian is a leader for whom a better world is not just a dream, but doable. Dig into his work, experience the Interviews and you will see how there is the basis to have a radically new society based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which he wrote—yes, he wrote a constitution for a society where we could live at long last as human beings. Do you have any idea how big a deal that is? People say, what about other leaders? Who else has written a blueprint for a whole other emancipating way we could be living? And what is even more to the point, the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic written by yes, this leader, develops a whole legal framework in a new society that enables masses of people to become masters of society. BA’s vision and plan is the way for people to collectively know and change the world to overcome all the forms of oppression and exploitation that people suffer and die under in this capitalist-imperialist system we live under. 

I am so bored and so fucking over people saying “I don’t want to follow one leader, let alone an older white man,” when they are being led like sheep to accept the world the way it is—at best trying to carve out a little space for themselves. And what makes me all the more furious is when they haven’t even experienced, checked out or read, the work BA has done. 

What you will experience watching the BA Interviews is not just a leader who shows why this system is the cause of all that oppresses people today, why this system is leading to the destruction of the environment, and why it is unbelievably careening towards world war—nuclear war, and why it cannot be reformed. BA has not just developed a vision and blueprint for a new society. And, he has not left us hanging without a way to get to that new society. He has developed a way—right now, to go to work building up the forces for revolution and then a strategy for actually waging that revolution with a real chance to win. That’s a big deal. 

This is what makes your being at The Clemente Center, on the Lower East Side of New York, next Tuesday so important—experiencing all of this on the big screen with the opportunity for you to ask me your hardest questions and for us to talk. Look this may be surprising to you, Bob Avakian has analyzed that the possibility opening up for a chance to make a real revolution is not far off. The conditions for revolution are maturing in this country due to the deep divide among the rulers of this country between the fascist Republican Party of Trump, and the business-as-usual War Criminal Party of Biden, the Democrats. But, to find out why this is such a rare moment when revolution could really be possible, you need to be there. The answer is in the Selections From The Bob Avakian Interviews On The RNL Show. 

And more to the point—this rare time can only be seized with more and more people, like you, getting with this revolution, getting into BA, and there’s no better time or place than next week in NYC.

Let me put this simply—since I’m gonna be in the land of elevators, this is what they call an elevator pitch: 

If you haven’t experienced Bob Avakian you don’t know what you need to know. More fundamentally this isn’t just about you—it’s about whether or not all the suffering in the world will go on and on. It’s about whether or not there will even be a future with the destruction of the climate and the danger of nuclear war. It’s about whether or not we can prepare and organize thousands of people for the time that could come soon, when we could really make a revolution to emancipate all of humanity.

That’s what people need to know. And they can’t know it without being there.

We recently published on our website, revcom.us, an important guide to getting prepared for revolution titled Revolution, Building Up the Basis to Go for the Whole Thing, with a Real Chance to Win: Strategic Orientation and Practical Approach.

As part of 10 points that we can carry out, and I say “we” meaning all of you as well the revcoms, it speaks in one of those points, point 3, to the role that Bob Avakian plays and why he’s so important. It says this:

Bob Avakian is completely different than the endless stream of bourgeois (capitalist) “leaders” who are put forward, and others who cannot see, or will not look, beyond the confines of this horrific system. He is hard-core for revolution, with a largeness of mind, generosity of spirit, and lively sense of humor…

A leader like this has never before existed in the history of this country. Having a leader like this is a rare and precious thing for the masses of people who are so terribly oppressed under this system. It is a powerful positive factor for the revolution that is urgently needed, with the goal of ending all oppression and finally bringing about the emancipation of humanity as a whole.

This is what you get in the special film: Selections From The Bob Avakian Interviews On The RNL Show.