We wrote a couple weeks ago about the work that's been done in a number of cities to spread the powerful piece Allegiance... and the further work to be done to carry out the challenge in the piece itself—to change how people are thinking and acting. Since then, we've encountered more debate and controversy... including reactionaries who want to defend this system. This needs to be seized on for revolution.
1) We need to take—and maintain (or re-seize)—the initiative/offensive and set the terms in that way. Let backward-ass fools try to defend this system and this country. Don’t let them—or any expression of backward (or outright reactionary) views, on anything—set the terms. As we have stressed: Use. The. Text. of Allegiance itself. And marshal the substance (at revcom.us and on The RNL Show) that has demonstrated many, many times over the criminal nature of this system and this country, and contrast this with the emancipating system we are aiming for. (This is brought alive in We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System and in The Bob Avakian Interviews.)
In BAsics 3:1, Bob Avakian (BA) says: “Let’s get down to basics: We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.”
This is true—and we have the facts to back this up. Given the overwhelming evidence we have for this, there is absolutely no reason to be defensive. And being defensive, including by letting backward shit among the masses set the terms, is an expression of populism/populist epistemology and (“mass line”).1 This is the idea that what people think determines what's true. But that's anti-scientific bullshit. As BA says in BAsics 4:11, “What people think is part of objective reality, but objective reality is not determined by what people think.”
So there's no basis for defensiveness and tailing, including being thrown by backward shit, among basic youth and others. Let any wannabe Buffalo Soldiers and other backward fools try to defend this shit (of this system and this country). But, instead of letting that shit set the terms, quickly and repeatedly bring things back to the real terms.
2) In this, the essential audience you need to be speaking to and reaching, in any given circumstance (and overall), are not any reactionaries but masses of people, including people who may be gathered around listening. Things need to be addressed to the masses. Insofar as you take into account the reactionaries, it is essentially to use them as “foils”—ridiculing and mocking them—in, once again, speaking to masses of people who are there and who can potentially be drawn to the scene, especially by effective agitation we do in speaking directly to the masses of people.
3) The revcoms are a serious and disciplined force for real revolution. In any situation, including if we're confronted by organized reactionaries, we need to maintain, and clearly come off as, that serious, disciplined revolutionary force—basing ourselves on the Points of Attention for the Revolution.
