Bob Avakian (BA) on the big screen! Tuesday night, November 28, the Teatro SEA at the Clemente Center on the Lower East Side of New York City was filled with close to 80 people from different backgrounds, ages and points of view. They were there together to watch the film “Selections from the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution Nothing Less!—Show” on the big screen, and to engage in serious discussion with the host of The RNL Show, Andy Zee, about what they had just experienced, and the big questions that were sparked by this. There were people from Harlem, college students, artists, activists, longtime supporters of the movement for revolution, friends of Revolution Books and people met on the streets of the Lower East Side just a week earlier.

Everyone kept saying that until you’ve seen the BA Interviews on the big screen you don’t realize what you are missing. Many people in the house had seen the interviews or at least parts of them, but there is no comparison for seeing them together with others in a theater. The whole thing is a different, even more profound experience than watching alone at home—BA telling the stories of his life, how he became the revolutionary communist leader he is, really speaking from the heart and waging struggle with everyone in the audience. Afterwards one person said, “I was anticipating it would be good but hadn’t been able to really imagine it till I saw it. Plus you’re in a room with different people reacting to different things—applauding, laughing, murmuring in agreement, especially during some of the last few sections played.”

Questions Sparked by Watching the BA Interviews Together

When the film was over, hands went up to go further into big questions. Kicking it off, the first question was, “…I’m looking at Palestine right now, and it would seem to me, as a group, that we are missing out on being able to be leaders when these things pop up, because strategic alliances were not made in advance… We are behind, I’ve always felt that… We know time is of the essence, this is the opportune time to make revolution, but there are so few of us.…” Andy’s answer to this important question was played on Episode #176 of The RNL Show. 

A high school student brand new to the revolution asked: “What is the science behind your revolution?” And, “You said something about what a revolution needs and it needs guidance. That’s what a lot of us youth is missing.” After speaking to what is the scientific approach to understanding reality and where the interests of humanity lie, Andy responded to the question of guidance saying, “I think they [the youth] need revolutionary leadership and they need to become revolutionary leaders. Watching this [the BA Interviews] the full five hours and watching it again, and then watching The RNL Show every week is the beginning of getting the guidance. Training yourself and training your friends, and training people you don’t know yet to see the world for how it actually is, and then go to work with others to bring about the possibility of a radically different world…” 

A supporter of the revolution went back to the question of science: “BA brought it up a lot in the film about applying the scientific method, and I still feel some confusion over how to properly apply it. When you think about how we research things on the internet, and then the algorithms work to favor certain information. Are there tips or questions we should ask to really apply the scientific method when trying to uncover whether something is true or not?” Her second question was: “This is related to the question you asked BA at the end, one of the biggest hurdles in my experience is that people feel like they deserve to be there, they did it to themselves, did the crime, didn’t study, they see it as their personal faults and how do you break through that without discounting some of the bad shit…” 

Another Revolution Books supporter posed, “Why don’t you believe in our capitalist system? Relate what the profit motive does to the availability of healthcare in our country. Relate what the profit motive does to the availability of education in our country. Relate what the profit motive does to the situation of housing we have. How could anybody be in denial of the fact that it’s not working when we have how many millions of people, millions and millions not being able to afford their rent or homeless? It’s obviously not working. Why if this is considered the richest country in the world are so many people food insecure, those basic human rights capitalism does not guarantee to us…”

Andy responded to her “that maybe the comments you made about how this system is not working for education, healthcare… maybe a scientific approach would be to say that it is working the way it is set up to work and that is not in the interests of humanity. We actually need to have a different system that would work differently and would enable us to provide education, healthcare, the basic needs of life, culture, for all of humanity.” He opened up the broadsheet We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System, reading out the demands there for a truly just socialist society where human beings would flourish. These will be the principles of the new socialist society based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian.

After the screening, when asked, “What would you say to people about why they should see this film?” a Black man with immigrant roots said: “If you’re unfamiliar with who BA is, Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolutionary communists, then this is the one succinct movie you need to see to understand who he is, to understand his ideas, and to see in person the deep analysis that he has, the deep concern he has for people all over the world.” A college student commented on BA’s observation that there is a stunning lack of curiosity today. Reflecting on the program she felt a real “sense of community” and appreciated the way Andy was leading the discussion—respectful but being sharp in his responses. A West African artist said the film “opens your mind, opens your eyes, on everything, on a lot of things going on.”

A Challenge at a Crucial Moment

The event ended with Andy Zee drawing further on BA's analysis that this is a rare time when revolution has become more possible than, as BA said in the Interviews, any of our lifetimes. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance in this pivotal year. Andy went into the shortcomings of the revolutionary communists over the past few years, as BA sharply and frankly does in the Interviews. That the revcoms haven't been struggling hard with the masses of people over all the wrong thinking that keeps them from seeing the necessity and possibility for a real emancipatory revolution.

Andy went on, “I am trying to struggle with you, all of you, to see that there is a way out of this madness, the world is rapidly changing in a reactionary direction but it is on us to shake people out of the stupor that they are in, out of the BS they are thinking about, looking for some safe space in a world going to hell, to see that there is a different potential, the potential for a radically different society and world… Come this election, there is going to be some kind of showdown, some kind of reckoning, and if there is not a different force, as people’s lives are being disrupted, as the things they counted on (are ripped away)… If we don’t bring forward a force of many thousands of people who are representing a different way out of this madness, a different society, and are serious about it, and are prepared to fight for it, then it’s going to be game over, BUT, that’s not necessary now.

“There is enough time, but it is going to require people here doing everything they can to spread these Interviews, to spread The RNL Show, to get into the Constitution for the New Socialist Society in North America... to take up this manifesto, We Need and We Demand, which is intended to be the demand of millions of people in that crisis: ‘The Existing Capitalist-Imperialist System And Institutions Of Government In This Country Must Be Abolished And Dismantled—And Replaced By A New, Socialist System Based On The CONSTITUTION FOR THE NEW SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN NORTH AMERICA.’ 

“The house is on fire, the tidal wave has begun. Now is the time to get organized to do what we can actually do, to build the kind of movement where heads would turn. Where people would say this leader and these people—they speak the truth, they are not afraid to be unpopular, because they are bringing you the truth you need to hear.”

This event made powerfully clear the impact even these selections from the Bob Avakian Interviews can have on people. This film, the full five hours of the BA Interviews, and The RNL Show, urgently need to be seen by tens of thousands, and then multiply that by 10. BA and these Interviews are what people need to engage in themselves, and to spread very broadly.