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Correspondence from a reader:

Road Trip

For the last few years around this time (September), I have taken long road trips through neighboring states. And while on these trips, I find ways to promote BA, The RNL Show and revcom.us. Getting out on the road to areas far from home both has given me some insight of the lay of the land and to think more about how we could actually win. I also tried to visit as many of the towns as I could, that would drive Jason Aldean (“Try That in a Small Town”) and his fans livid.

In 2021, my first foray, I went through the Northwest—Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and northern California and Nevada. I took with me stencils I had made of the iconic BA image and a stencil that said, “Revolution, Nothing Less! YouTube.com/therevcoms,” and stenciled my way through every major college and university along the way.

BA Stencil at Univ of Washington

 

Stencil at University of Washington.   

In 2022, I developed a simple 8½ x 11 REVOLUTION, NOTHING LESS! sticker that used a QR code that would not only take people to the revcom.us site, but would capture metrics—when it was opened and where the smartphone number opening it was registered, giving me a rough idea of its reach. Last year, I posted the sticker through the Southwest and at every major college and university campus in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The QR code got over 2,650 hits and still counting (from all over the U.S. + a few other countries).

This year, 2023, once again, I went to Northwest states, roughly retracing my previous route, but also adding universities in Utah and other spots. This year, the emphasis was on saturation postering the new materials on revcom.us, so I loaded assorted posters in my van along with wheat paste and makings for more paste and headed off. I went through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon and California. I slept in campgrounds. (While other campers might be fixing dinner over a campfire, I was cooking up glue!) I had also printed up hundreds of the QR code Revolution, Nothing Less! stickers,1 along with other color stickers I downloaded from revcom.us Resources. Where it was hard to get access to wheat paste, I used spray glue for the posters. I also sprayed or pasted the broadsheets, English and Spanish2 around campuses and in the inner cities.

I would like to highlight a particular significant (and humorous) experience. I was postering at Evergreen College, a progressive school in Olympia, Washington. (They once had Mumia Abu Jamal as a commencement speaker by phone from prison in Pennsylvania.) I was pasting up the broadsheets and the “What? You don’t know?” posters, when a voice behind me asked, “Are you the one putting up these posters?” Startled, I said yes, preparing to defend them. It was a young student. They asked, “Do you mind if I take a picture?” “Better yet, I’ll give you one.” “Wow, thanks,” they said. “Are you with the Avakian people?” “Yes, I am. How do you know about him?” They explained, “A couple of years ago some people came to our campus and painted stencils of him all over.” “Really?” I replied. “Yeah, would you like to see one?” “I sure would!” I said. ”We thought they might have been from Seattle. They have a bookstore up there. Some of us have been hoping they would come back.” I was led on a brisk walk across the campus to the cement walkway behind the amphitheater. There, faded, worn and barely recognizable was the BA iconic image from a couple years earlier. “There are others, all over,” my guide said.

We exchanged emails, and I gave them a stack of materials to share with friends, and a promise to keep in touch.

Watch:

Poster for Bob Avakian Heart & Soul and Hardcore for Revolution

 

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FOOTNOTES:

1. There have been over 500 “opens” of the QR so far from this trip alone, the largest number ever for one month. [back]

2. I didn’t have any Spanish posters, so I made it a point to post the Spanish broadsheet “Somos Los Revcom” everywhere. It was obvious to me in my travels through the Northwest, that except in very large cities in Oregon and Washington, there were very few significant concentrations of Black people. But everywhere in the overwhelmingly white rural section of the Northwest (where many people, but not all, are part of the fascist base), the economy from logging, to farming, mining and construction, depends very heavily on immigrant labor. For instance, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, famous as a winter sports mecca, there is a massive building boom for the influx of tourists. But, as in many other places in the U.S., the people who dominate the workforce are immigrants from across the southern border. This made me think of what BA raises in WHY WE NEED AN ACTUAL REVOLUTION AND HOW WE CAN REALLY MAKE REVOLUTION, about the need to break through the “encirclement and suppression” and how immigrants in these rural areas are a crucial part of solving that contradiction the need to find ways to work on that. [back]

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From the genocide in Gaza, to the growing threat of world war between nuclear powers, to escalating environmental devastation… the capitalist-imperialist system ruling over us is a horror for billions around the world and is tearing up the fabric of life on earth. Now the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class, between fascist Republicans and war criminal Democrats, is coming to a head—likely during, or before, the coming elections—ripping society apart unlike anything since the Civil War.

Bob Avakian (BA), revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, has developed a strategy to prepare for and make revolution. He’s scientifically analyzed that this is a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible, and has laid out the sweeping vision, solid foundation and concrete blueprint for “what comes next,” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

The website revcom.us follows and applies that leadership and is essential to all this. We post new materials from BA and curate his whole body of work. We apply the science he’s developed to analyze and expose every key event in society, every week. Revcom.us posts BA’s timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists), including his social media posts which break this down for people every week and sometimes more. We act as a guiding and connecting hub for the growing revcom movement nationwide: not just showing what’s being done, but going into what’s right and what’s wrong and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force.

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

So what should you give to make 2024 our year—a year of revolution?
Everything you possibly can!
DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!

Your donations contribute to:

  • Promotion of BA on social media and the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show
  • Strengthen revcom.us as an accessible, secure, robust website able to rise to the challenge of meeting the extraordinary demands of navigating the storms and preparing for revolution in this pivotal, unprecedented year
  • Fund revcoms to travel to national “hotspots,” where extreme contradictions are pulling apart the fabric of this country and creating the possibility of wrenching an actual revolution out of this intensifying situation
  • Expand the reach and coverage of revcom.us
  • Printing and distribution of key Revcom materials including the Declaration “WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM” and the Proclamation, “WE ARE THE REVCOMS (Revolutionary Communists)”

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