This weekend a crew of six people from longtime revolutionaries to people just stepping into the revolution came together to make a first big effort to announce to Austin, Texas, “We need and we demand a whole new way to live, a fundamentally different system,” and spread the Proclamation, We Are the Revcoms. We wanted to make a big splash, so we identified a few walls and street corners to wheat paste large displays. Some of the Proclamations and We Demand… posters had been taped together so we could get them up quickly, and one member of the crew made a couple of beautiful large handmade signs on thin paper (with permanent marker) with parts of the We Need And We Demand declaration.

At one spot, a gas station that had been shut down for years and already heavily tagged with graffiti, a man came up who said he was the manager of the property. We showed him what we were putting up and he said, “Oh this is good, you can put it up.” The postering was a lot of fun and easy to do with enough people. The New York Times even has an article about how to wheat paste posters, but you can also use white glue with a little bit of water.

The temperatures in Austin have been rising to about 105 degrees (F) all week, so by noon it was too hot to continue. We went back indoors to have lunch, get some R & R, and watch the Lenny Wolff talk at Revolution Books about the Proclamation and the Declaration. After the talk, we had a discussion to grapple with the need and challenge, and possibility of quickly polarizing people for revolution. Some interesting wrangling came up in the discussion. We talked about whether we are already in the revolutionary crisis or heading towards it, and what that might look like, and “how bad” things might have to get first.

We revisited Lenny’s “What if” questions about some scenarios that might set off a shocking jolt that could further cleave all of society. We talked about resetting the terms in society, and getting to the point when “how much something can be turned into a commodity is no longer setting the terms.” We were trying to put our beginning effort in the context of working back from the seizure of power and winning over masses of people to revolution now, and went back to the basketball analogy from Lenny’s talk. Not just that we have to get back on track if we “lose a game” by studying what we did and solving the problems so we can win, but that all these different elements, all these different things we’re doing, in different parts of the country, are working toward the same goal of winning, of actually bringing this system down and establishing a fundamentally different system. We who are beginning to forge more revolutionary collectivity here in Texas are trying to understand the process we are a part of, and in the course of taking initiative and doing things to spread the revolution, we’ll learn more. We also talked about some metrics to measure if we’re on track—social media follows and engagement, being able to involve more people on the ground even as they’re learning about the revolution, and raising money.

Although we tried, we did not figure out a good place to set up a table (which had beautiful earrings and art to sell as well as T-shirts and other materials) for fundraising. We did not succeed in making revolution an attractive pole to people who were walking around in the evening heat full of obliviousness and American parasitism. This is going to take a lot of getting out there at different times and different spots but we were confident that we can learn how to do this if we keep trying. We identified some problems and what we can do differently next time.

The wheat pasting—not only covering the walls but learning how to do this as a team—was a big accomplishment. But our biggest accomplishment was the transformation of the team from getting together to “do something” to really cohering around the common purpose of getting this revolution on the map. Overall, it was a great beginning.