As we reported last week:

A team of revcoms went to the American Sociological Association (ASA) conference in Philly, where thousands of sociology students, professors, and others gathered August 17-21. We took out two important initiatives and campus tours which go directly up against two of the biggest mental straitjackets keeping young people and intellectuals trapped within the framework of this system: Sunsara Taylor’s “‘Woke’ Lunacy vs. Real Revolution” tour, and Raymond Lotta’s “You've Been Lied To! The First Communist Revolutions Were Liberating... The NEW Communist Revolution Will Be Far Better” tour. We widely spread We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System and the Bob Avakian Interviews, and opened up lots of discussion and debate about the state of the world and urgent need and possibility for revolution. In particular, we stirred up controversy around the statement “A Seven Point Indictment: ‘Woke’ is a destructive force in the political, intellectual, artistic and ethical life of society.” And we laid the seeds for speaking events this Fall on college campuses around the country.

Throughout the conference, many people were provoked and challenged by our message, their curiosity and interest piqued. We saturated the conference with our materials, created a buzz, and consistently had a very lively scene with people gathered around our table to talk. Dozens of people signed up with us to learn more about the revolution and potentially host one of the campus tours.

At the same time, there was also a lot of polite (or sometimes not so polite) ignore-ance, a reluctance to fully confront the dire situation humanity faces (climate disaster, danger of world war, looming civil war in the U.S., etc.), or to seriously engage the analysis of the need (and greater possibility) of real revolution in this moment—as concentrated in the works and leadership of Bob Avakian (BA). Our team got a deeper appreciation for how embedded “wokeness” and anti-communism are in the thinking of intellectuals these days, how much these frameworks lead and enable people to accommodate to this capitalist-imperialist system and its escalating horrors, and how necessary it is to sharply struggle right from the beginning against these roadblocks to revolution.

Some people we met were quite concerned about how “woke” is silencing students and making them afraid to engage with “sensitive” issues at all out of fear of “saying the wrong thing”; how it has negatively impacted the discipline of sociology by turning the focus toward a narrower and narrower obsession with identity; and how it has “empowered” students to weaponize oppression to wrongly target professors and others. Others claimed we were exaggerating and sensationalizing the problem. Some openly defended woke identity politics, or at least aspects of it, often on the grounds that it is wrong to even use the word “woke” and critique it because that just reinforces the racists and fascists. Hard-core wokesters would just crumple up our flyers and refuse to engage.

Among the wokesters at this conference, as well as many of those who don’t like the grotesque expressions of wokeness, the philosophical framework of “standpoint epistemology” tends to dominate—the notion that people’s understanding of the truth depends on their identity and direct experience. This anti-scientific approach, and the identity politics police who enforce it by dictating who has a “right” to speak, is actively preventing people from looking at the big picture, root causes, and real solutions.

A lot of people wrongly interpreted our polemic against “woke” identity politics as advocating for uniting people around “class” as opposed to “race and gender.” In fact, the communist revolution we are fighting for aims to overthrow and abolish the entire capitalist-imperialist system in the only way it can be done: by abolishing ALL forms of exploitation and oppression based on class, race, sex, and gender. This understanding has been taken further in the new communism developed by BA. This is NOT some “class reductionist” reformist labor movement.

Often at the ASA, people would try to indicate to us that they are doing something good—I know all about Marx, I teach “social movements,” I organize with my grad student union, etc. And often this would be part of their justification for not needing to engage with us. In fact, as we pointed out to them, the “social movements” and “labor activism” that they are studying and involved in is all part of the ecology of this capitalist-imperialist system. What is needed is a radical break from this system—a real revolution and a whole new system based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian—not just movements within it, and certainly not a parasitic imperialist so-called “socialism” whose goal is nothing more than an “equitable” distribution of the spoils of U.S. plunder around the world.

While the sociologists at the ASA were not as “triggered” by the word communism as they were by the critique of “woke,” anti-communism is the ground they are all standing on. Fundamental change has been ruled off the table—change should be gradual and through the processes of this system (or tinkering around in its margins), because radical change just leads to horrors, and any serious attempt to overcome oppression just leads to oppression in new forms. Underlying these false assumptions is the verdict, which “everybody knows,” that the revolutions in Russia and China “failed.” In fact, as Raymond Lotta has been pointing out, what people think they “know” about this is just what’s been drilled into their heads by this system and its “experts,” as part of keeping the lid on people’s capacity to conceive of a world beyond capitalism.

Basing themselves on the new communism developed by Bob Avakian, a whole new framework for human emancipation which builds on the core of Marxism and the liberating achievements of the first wave of communist revolutions, but also breaks with unscientific and harmful tendencies which have existed within communism, Sunsara Taylor and Raymond Lotta are aiming to bust that lid open and win a new generation to revolution at this critical moment.

But even among the students and professors at this conference who were turning their heads toward revolution and considering bringing one or both of these tours to their campus, there was a lot of hesitancy and fear. Fear of the fascists, fear of the “woke” backlash, fear of their employer, fear of their colleagues, fear of their students, etc. Multiple people said they’d like to host this tour, but they’re on track to get tenure soon, so maybe wait until after. In all this there was a need to keep pulling things back to the unprecedented situation in the world, the divisions in U.S. society which are deepening by the day (with the Trump indictments), and how all this can only be resolved in a radically reactionary or radically emancipating way—and which way it goes depends to a great extent on what we do. There is no hiding from this reality, and no one should want to! Right now, women’s right to control their own bodies is being snatched away in state after state, trans people are being erased, people who put up LGBTQ pride flags are being murdered, Black people are being gunned down by Nazis for no reason at all except the color of their skin, migrants whose homelands have been wrecked by this system are dying in the Mediterranean and the Rio Grande, billions of people are already feeling the sweltering effects of climate catastrophe. Why should anyone accept this?

Yes, there are risks, even in something as simple as hosting an academic event with the revcoms. This itself is an indictment of the terrible state of intellectual life in this country, and it is more reason that this discussion/debate needs to be opened up. And the fact is, there is no painless progress, and no real change without taking risks. As Bob Avakian put it in  Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution:

[I]n any real struggle to deal with any real oppression, up against powerful enforcers of that oppression, you are going to have to face the prospect of real sacrifice, including the prospect of being physically attacked. And if you think that you can carve out little safe enclaves, and that this is somehow going to lead to any kind of significant change in society, you are full of illusions and delusions.

As the revcoms got out there at this conference, disrupting people’s illusions and challenging them to step outside their comfort zones and engage real revolution, some “woke” haters who were too cowardly to debate us in person decided to get on Twitter and talk shit. One even wanted us arrested, writing “seriously, where was the Convention Center and Marriott security? I’m rarely one for carceral solutions but good grief.” Our great crime? Trying to get students and professors to THINK about the big problems humanity faces and the revolutionary solution. Another tweeted, “any claim to be exercising free speech disappears when you trap people in dialogue.” OMG how dare we engage intellectuals in DIALOGUE! Of course, when the cops don’t come to your rescue, you can always play the “get out of thought free” card by ignorantly tweeting that Bob Avakian and the revcoms are a “cult,” which several haters did.

All this is just an ugly expression of what Bob Avakian wrote in “LIBERALS: WHAT IS THEIR PROBLEM?”:

[A] whole section of middle class “liberals,” whose basic problem is that, despite inclinations to oppose certain forms of injustice and oppression, they are so wedded to this system that they strongly resist engaging, or even outright refuse to engage, the decisive question of what is really necessary to end oppression and exploitation—the decisive question of reform vs. revolution—and in particular they have a strong aversion to engaging a substantial presentation of why reforming this system of capitalism-imperialism in a way that would be in the fundamental interests of humanity is impossible, and this system must be overthrown, through an actual revolution, and replaced with a radically different and far better system.

Despite many people’s preference to avoid these decisive questions, our work at the ASA conference also revealed the potential to transform this section of society, especially in this rare time when the contradictions of this system are intensifying and things are going to extremes. The fact is, many people in this section of society do care about one or more of the 5 STOPS.¹  And, as one member of our team commented:

While it’s true that people are caught up in all kinds of bullshit, including wokeness and anti-communism, it’s also true that I encountered a lot of people who are dealing with some really important issues and had a lot of broadness of mind and intellectual curiosity. It’s hemmed in in a lot of ways, but it’s there.

At the same time, our experience at this conference also confirmed that the necessary re-polarization for revolution will only happen through ferocious struggle against all the ways of thinking that are standing in the way of revolution, as a critical part of all-around revolutionary work.