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Outreach to Professors: Invite the Revcoms to Speak to Your Class!

A team from the Revolution Tour has been strategizing on how to go outside of our immediate networks and reach out broadly to the middle class—for real engagement and impact with The Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, and to raise funds to put this revolution on the map. In this, we've also wrestled with the strategic importance of reaching those among the intelligentsia who really care—challenging them to get into this revolution, at this urgent time.

We've been brainstorming creative ideas to reach people who work in tech or the arts. And in particular, wanted to reach people in academia before the winter break. We made a plan to reach the professors at a college campus where the Revolution Tour had some impact earlier in the semester. 

We wrote a mass email asking them to invite us to speak to their classes next semester. The email was framed by the reality that we're in a rare time when revolution has become more possible, and we introduced people to The Bob Avakian Interviews. We also linked to our recent experience at another university where the Revolution Tour was invited to speak to a class on "woke" obstructionism. We linked specifically to the urgency of breaking open this debate and the overall debate on reform vs. revolution, and asking them directly to donate towards this. 

This letter was emailed out to about 350 professors. We also spent several hours hand delivering this letter to professors and lecturers at a whole range of departments (we also included the fund drive leaflet and a palm card for The Bob Avakian Interviews). We distributed about 600 copies of these packets. While we knew it was going to be difficult to find professors, we persevered. We spoke with department offices and told them about the content of the letter and they let us put them in all the department's mailboxes. 

We also found a few professors in their offices and in the hallways and we made our pitch in person.  One professor took us very seriously and said “I'm not quite sure how this will fit in my class but I think it's important.” She then said it might work in a class she's teaching on law, asking how long our presentation might be, who'd be doing the presentation, etc. At a certain point in the discussion she did raise concern regarding the more backward students in her classes to which we reiterated the point that that's exactly what we want to open up and referenced the Yeats quote that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” by way of making the point of needing to change the polarization. Another professor in the history department was headed to a meeting and when we gave him the basic pitch and said these are pre-civil war days it made him stop. He was further provoked by the fact that we were arguing for a societal wide debate on reform or revolution (he said he'd get back to us). Another professor told us he received our email that morning and just hadn't had a minute to reply. Other professors were provoked by the fact that we were talking about revolution and were open to discussing this further.

We've also received a few replies to our mass email. One professor said he'd forward it to an academic student association because “this could be a very interesting topic for them/us.” He was familiar with revcom from the ʼ80s and listens to BA regularly on The Michael Slate show on KPFK.  Another wrote back they'd like to have us speak in their anthropology class and asked us to follow up at the beginning of next semester.

This is still initial, and we'll need to follow up with everyone at the beginning of next semester, but we thought this was important experience to share.  

We are at a turning point in history. The capitalist-imperialist system is a horror for billions of people here and around the world and threatening the very fabric of life on earth. Now the election of fascist Trump poses even more extreme dangers for humanity—and underscores the total illegitimacy of this system, and the urgent need for a radically different system.

The website Revcom.us follows the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the author of the new communism. Bob Avakian has scientifically analyzed that we are in a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible in the U.S. He’s charted a strategy for making that revolution, and laid out a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for “what comes next” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

Revcom.us projects BA’s voice, leadership, and vision throughout society. It posts his timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists) and the whole movement for revolution, including his social media posts, and curates his whole body of work. 

Our website applies the scientific approach BA has developed to analyze major events in society and the world—why they are happening, how they relate to each other, how all this relates to the system we live under, where people's interests lie, how revolution is in fact the solution to all this, and what the goals of that revolution are.

Revcom.us acts as a guiding and connecting hub for the revcom movement nationwide: showing what’s being done, digging into what’s right and what’s wrong, and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force. As part of this, revcom.us feature and promotes the weekly The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube.com. 

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but rises to a whole different level!

DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!

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If you are horrified at the Trump/MAGA fascism spawned by this system of capitalism-imperialism coming to power in the world’s top nuclear-armed superpower… outraged at the tremendous harm this fascism is perpetrating on people in this country and the whole world… hate the Dark Ages morality and Christian fascism that they are trying to forcibly impose…see the very existence of humanity being threatened by the increasing danger of nuclear war and destruction of the environment: Be part of supporting this revcom.us website that—now more than ever—plays a crucial role in exposing the system ruling over us and in leading people out of this madness to a radically different and far better future. 

See FIVE REASONS you should donate, spread the word about revcom.us, and urge your friends and others to donate and subscribe to this website.