This past December, the Columbia Spectator, the online and hard-copy campus newspaper of Columbia University, did a feature story on Revolution Books, New York City. The reason cited was that the bookstore had become a more familiar presence on campus, including building solidarity with the stirring uprising in Iran against the brutal and patriarchal rule of the theocratic state. Two reporters visited the store, attended a major program at which an excerpt on the war over Ukraine from one of the Bob Avakian Interviews was shown and discussed, and spoke with several people, including Carl Dix, the longtime revolutionary and follower of Bob Avakian.

The resulting article, titled “Revolution Books and the Party Behind It,” was full of misleading and anticommunist characterizations of the store and Bob Avakian. We wrote a reply: “Setting the Record Straight on Revolution Books—Beacon for a Whole New World.” There was back-and-forth, and struggle, with the Spectator editors to see this through. But they seemed to appreciate our insistence on standing on principle and bringing forth the truth about the mission and work of Revolution Books and what Bob Avakian actually stands for.

With the reply posted, we want to spread the debate further and invite more people on campus to learn about Bob Avakian and the revolution to emancipate humanity, and to become part of the life of Revolution Books. Below is our published reply and a link to the original article. 

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Opinion | Letters to the Editor

Setting the record straight on Revolution Books: beacon for a whole new world

By Carl Dix and Raymond Lotta • February 1, 2023

The Eye’s December 9 feature, “Revolution Books and the Party Behind It,” attempts to take a serious look at Revolution Books, Bob Avakian, and the Revolutionary Communist Party. However, its account unfortunately does not succeed in capturing our fundamental principles and practices.

This piece’s mischaracterizations are especially concerning given the nature of our present moment. Humanity is facing a rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe, the growing danger of nuclear war, rampaging fascism, and more. Revolution Books provides readers an evidence-based approach that challenges prevailing narratives to dig into the roots of these crises and explains why only revolution can address them and how reaching a radically different and far better world is achievable. Whatever the authors’ intentions may have been, the profile’s thrust is dismissive, an angle that inevitably discourages readers from confronting the gravity of our situation and engaging with real revolution when it is needed now more than ever.

There are four key parts of the article that we must address to clarify our mission, and moreover to prevent this from coming to pass.

First, this feature depicts the revolutionary leader Avakian, and the RCP he leads, as being steeped in “dogma,” and suggests that his followers are unthinking devotees who blindly repeat anything he says. In reality, dogma and blind devotion are anathemas to Avakian’s ideology. Rather, he has critically examined the Marxist project and brought forward a new communism that represents a qualitative development of Marxism, advocating examination of U.S. society and the world through the lens of science, not any form of religiosity, and in a break with past revolutions. He insists that “the new communism thoroughly repudiates and is determined to root out of the communist movement the poisonous notion, and practice, that ‘the ends justifies the means.’”

You would not grasp the full depth of this mission from reading “Revolution Books and the Party Behind It,” because the authors never delve into or substantially indicate the real scope and nature of Avakian’s work, nor do they touch on his engagement with critical questions such as why capitalism-imperialism is incapable of ending white supremacy, women’s oppression, or environmental destruction; why we’re living in a rare time, wherein revolution is becoming increasingly possible; or how the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Avakian, lays out a concrete and visionary blueprint for a society moving toward human emancipation.

The authors attended a bookstore program previewing the important new “Heart and Soul & Hard-Core For Revolution” interviews with Avakian. The segment shown was on Ukraine and the danger of nuclear war. Avakian analyzes it as a reactionary proxy war between the U.S. and Russia, with each driven by the “gangster logic” of imperialism. He warns that it could escalate to a nuclear war threatening all humanity and concludes, “We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.” The Eye’s feature, however, makes no mention of Avakian’s analysis of this urgent topic. Instead, it devotes five paragraphs to complaints from someone who volunteered at a Revolution Books outlet for several days—40 years ago! Imagine an article citing a former student who spent a few days auditing one of Brian Greene’s classes decades ago as an authority on his vast corpus of work.

What does come through in the feature is that, while some people are attracted to Avakian’s vision, others hate and feel threatened by it—precisely because his leadership is about completely upending the exploitative and oppressive confines of today’s world through real revolution, and not solely for the emancipation of one group or another, but for all humanity.

Second, The Eye’s feature includes a description of an October 14 speakout at Columbia, organized by supporters of Revolution Books and others, held in solidarity with the uprising in Iran against its vicious theocracy and patriarchy. Recounting this protest, its authors and interviewees accuse us of being unable to work with others, and of co-opting the struggle in Iran to advance our own agenda—of hiding “behind claims of solidarity and unity in order to duck criticism.”

In reality, those of us from Revolution Books and other followers of Avakian were not hiding behind anything—we were advocating for nothing except our stated goals. We’d been calling on students to actively support the Iranian uprising since it began in late September, advocating for debate on what it would take to liberate women, and arguing that an emancipatory communist revolution was needed for people in Iran and elsewhere to be free.

The article actually admits this, reporting that an Iranian student was shocked by our flyer “promoting the RCP and their goal of revolution through communism,” a view they ostensibly disagreed with. The framing of this objection suggests that the issue was not a lack of transparency, but rather that raising the issue of revolution takes some people out of their comfort zones. This prompted them to simply shut down discussion and debate and critique the RCP’s presence on campus on that basis. This is not hypothetical; though the feature acknowledges that we were counter-protested, its authors fail to describe the extent to which these demonstrators actively disrupted our speakout.

And what was the criticism we were allegedly “ducking?” It was that “there was,” to quote one Iranian student interviewed for the feature, “no attempt to defer to our voices, as actual Iranians.” Let’s unpack this. It is essential to give voice and expression to Iranians being directly impacted by the oppressive rule of the Islamic Republic, and indeed we did invite one of the protesting Iranian students to speak, which he did. But understanding the world and what’s required to change it is a matter of science—of what corresponds to reality, not the identity of the proponent. Identity cannot be used to muzzle debate over what path will actually lead to liberation.

Third, The Eye’s feature regurgitates the accusations initially made by reproductive rights organizations such as NYC for Abortion Rights, Reproductive Justice Collective, and the National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights “is a cult and pyramid scheme.” As Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has pointed out, it is the only group that consistently mobilized thousands in radical, nonviolent resistance to prevent the overturning of Roe v. Wade and to protest female enslavement qua forced motherhood. These damaging charges have been thoroughly refuted by both Rise Up and Sunsara Taylor, a co-initiator and follower of Avakian. These scare tactics harm the struggle for abortion rights and spread misinformation about Avakian and the revolution he stands for.

Fourth, while “Revolution Books and the Party Behind It” is complimentary of the diverse selection of material on offer at Revolution Books, its authors argue that this is at odds with Avakian and the RCP, claiming that “contrasting the RCP’s dogma and difficulty cooperating with other groups, many of the books housed within Revolution Books contain themes and ideas that invite readers to draw conclusions about the world around them.” Ultimately, they conclude: “The books succeed where the party fails.”

In fact, the books and the RCP’s revolutionary message are of a unified piece. When you come to Revolution Books, as Andy Zee, our national spokesperson put it, “You have the opportunity to engage the whole world, the whole of human experience and to engage the revolutionary theory for how the world came to be the way it is today … and to grapple with how it could be radically different and far better—a world where all of humanity is free and all of humanity could flourish.”

We invite the Columbia community to learn more about Avakian via his new interviews on YouTube and his books and articles. We invite you to come to Revolution Books and experience it for yourself. Be a critical thinker and take responsibility for the fate of the planet. Join us in wrestling with the biggest issues confronting humanity today, at a bookstore that puts the whole world first. Seek out the truth that there is real hope and a real way forward for humanity: through a truly liberating revolution.

Carl Dix is a long-time revolutionary, follower of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, and co-initiator with Cornel West of Stop Mass Incarceration. Raymond Lotta is a political economist, advocate for the new communism developed by Bob Avakian, and a spokesperson for Revolution Books, NYC.

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For the original article, see Revolution Books and the Party Behind It, Jesse Levine and Itzel Franco, Columbia Spectator, December 9, 2022.