I was heartened to read a report of a team of revcoms stepping out boldly to unite with and bring revolution to a recent outpouring of students against the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. The revcoms boldly displayed the main slogans put forward by this website hitting hard against Israel's U.S.-backed genocide on Gaza, also calling out the reactionary dead end of Hamas, and fighting for a liberating revolution in Palestine and the world over. And it was good that the team got out the recent statements from BA on this question and other important materials.

At the same time, there were things that struck me in the report that I think we can and need to do even better on that have real stakes not only for the struggle to stop the slaughter of Gaza but also to make the revolution necessary so that these horrors never happen again anywhere. In grappling with this, I recommend that everyone read and really wrangle and work with incredible real-time leadership BA is providing to all of us in his recent piece “Palestine, Israel, Imperialism: War, The Danger of Even Greater War—and Revolution, Basic Orientation, Compelling Agitation and Moving the Masses.”

After describing the positive response to our slogans and that many students were reaching for and reading our flyers, the report noted that some of the protest organizers tried to prevent the revcoms from handing out literature. The revcoms called out the fact that "no one owns a protest." While that is true, it is unfortunately not how most people think right now and so just asserting it seems unlikely to move most people. To move people, we would probably need to draw out the ugly implications of seeking to “own” the struggle against oppression rather than fighting to unite all who can be united while opening up principled struggle over what it will really take to put an end to oppression.

More to the point, the question of “owning” a protest (while important to take on) is not the only—or even the main—question we need to rip open. As it turned out in this particular circumstance, there was enough breadth and broad interest among the students that the revcoms were not easily shut down. But, it would have even been better, in my view, for our people to directly take on the attempts to shut them down by posing how righteous and important it is that students were pouring out, but that there are big questions up that we all have a responsibility to get into: Why is this Israeli genocide happening? What is the role of “our” government here? What is the fundamental nature of Israel? How can the people of Palestine—and the people all over the world—really get free, and is this even possible? It is right to protest, but that is not even close to enough—we need a world where "never again" really is never again for anyone anywhere... for Gaza today and for the rest of the world everywhere. This is possible and this is what is contained in what we are bringing from the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian and overall in these flyers, and this is why everyone needs to get your hands on these now.

Then, depending on how things unfolded, we would need to sharpen up agitation over what is thrown back at us frontally, while continuing to reset terms to what is the real problem the people of Gaza and humanity face and what is the solution. If people throw snark against BA or the tired old line that "You guys just come in and take over" or whatever, then we need to directly take it on, reset the terms and challenge them over what BA has actually answered and how it relates to what people are righteously standing up around now as well as much more. We could draw from the powerful agitation from him on the flyer and challenge people as to why they are trying to block this. Do they disagree? What are their answers? Or are they afraid to have that debate because their answers don't measure up and so they shut it down? Thought police. Intellectual cowardice, but with life-and-death stakes.

I am definitely NOT saying to fixate on haters. We need to always aim towards the broad masses of people. But we need to DELINEATE in the process between not only the different political programs in contention and where they will lead, but also between the necessary and principled approach of tearing open the big questions and engaging the profound leadership BA is providing and the unprincipled, destructive approach of attacking and shutting this down. Without doing this our flyers and impact—even if taken up eagerly by many in the moment—will be much more likely to just blend in people's thinking back into the terms that already exist. Also, if we don't do this, the people who were more open to our materials will not be prepared to understand and reject the snark and other bullshit that they are very likely to be hit with as they go forward.

The report also says that at one point we got challenged by someone over whether we denounce Hamas. It is good that the revcoms stated clearly that Hamas is reactionary and should be condemned. And, it is a reflection of very harmful terms on campuses and more broadly now that we have to transform through struggle that a number of students immediately tried to rule any criticism of Hamas “out of order.” But what is unclear to me in the report is whether, while clearly condemning Hamas, we also hammered a point BA has been hitting hard: that, as reactionary as it is, Hamas doesn't hold a candle to the horror of Israel in terms of the scale and the nature of the reactionary violence they are able to inflict. For example, there is this from BA:

Yes, it is the case, as supporters of Israel continually insist, that there can be no “equivalence” between Israel and the Palestinians—but the reality is the reverse of what these supporters of Israel insist: There is no equivalence between the oppressor nation Israel, and the oppressed nation, Palestine; and the actions of the Israelis are far worse, in a whole different category, than even the atrocities committed by Hamas, because Israel is in a much more powerful position to carry out, and does carry out, such atrocities on a far greater scale and much more frequent basis!

The essential reality in all this is that the Israeli state (again, with the full backing of the U.S.) has created, and forcefully/viciously/murderously maintains, the apartheid and overall oppressive conditions in which the Palestinian people are effectively enslaved and forced to suffer terribly, on an ongoing basis. This is the fundamental source of the conflict—and no just resolution of this conflict can be achieved without a recognition of, and acting to overcome and uproot, this essential oppressive reality.

If the person asking whether we condemn Hamas was coming from a place of being aligned with the state of Israel, we needed to hammer that framework(!) while at the same time hitting Hamas's reactionary character hard. Hamas directly enslaves women, actively obscures the nature of the Palestine struggle (they insist that it is a religious war in direct opposition to the reality that it is about imperialism and national oppression) and straight up promotes killing Jews for being Jews (as gone into in the article “What Is Hamas?”). All this is not only totally reactionary, but it gives ammunition to Israel and the U.S. to attack and attempt to discredit the righteous and liberating struggle that Palestinians do have a right to wage!

Finally, it was unclear from the report how and whether our people brought alive the real and liberating kind of world that a real revolution rooted in the new communism of BA can open up. It is important that we bring this alive vividly and contrast this goal—of ending all oppression everywhere—with any notion of revenge or just lashing out within this existing imperialist nightmare. And we should directly challenge students and others to step into this revolution now—following through on their righteous motivation to stand up in protest by taking up the only way to get to a world where this kind of thing can never happen again.

I hope these observations are helpful as it is crucially important that these and other revcoms continue to get out boldly at the righteous outpourings against the slaughter of Gaza as well as everywhere we can in society right now as people are increasingly being stirred.