On Saturday, September 9, posters and displays of the declaration We Need and We Demand, a Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System, the We Are the Revcoms proclamation, and posters about The Bob Avakian Interviews appeared around the campus of the University of Texas (UT). This campus has strategic significance not only in Texas, but nationwide. A few of us were out early (it was another scorching day), but even by 6:30 am along the “Drag” (a strip of Guadalupe St. that runs along the UT campus), many lampposts and walls were covered with this material. For the next couple of hours as we were out there observing all this, we gave packets of the Declaration and Proclamation and other material to people passing down the street. 

At around 9 am, we set up a table in a plaza across from a bus stop, and played the audio of BA’s State of Emergency on a loop. At first, this didn’t attract much attention, but after about a half hour people started coming over to see who we were. One student came by because she was attracted by a beautiful flyer one of our team made with the title of “We Need and We Demand.” She said she agreed that we need a real revolution to overthrow the system and replace it with a far better system, and said there was an “underground” movement of students thinking about this question. She also said that we have to connect with the big campus organizations like SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) because otherwise how were we going to reach all the students? We talked about the saturation campaign, and she said she saw the posters up on the poles. We also put the question back to her, and challenged her to think of ways she could spread this among her networks. She said, “You’d be surprised what students think on this campus. This campus could be like 1968 again.”

One Latino guy donated $5 and was going to come back in an hour to buy a T-shirt, but we had to go before he came back. Another Latino guy who mostly spoke Spanish was really confused about what kind of revolution we were talking about—for who? We couldn’t really understand his confusion until he said, “Do you like Donald Trump?” and we were all very relieved when it became clear to him that we were not MAGA fascists twisting the meaning of revolution. He got the materials in Spanish.

We packed up at around 10:30 to go cool off and rest. After sundown, we went to a spot on North Campus where students live and hang out at a food truck park. The scene was hopping because there was a UT vs. Alabama football game—but even without that, this was a good corner where students walk around but aren’t rushing off to class. 

We set up a table and projected video of Bob Avakian’s “State of Emergency” onto a wall. We put a big banner across the front of the table that said REVOLUTION and displayed packets of revolutionary literature. We were all wearing different revcom shirts. Even before we had finished setting up, students started coming up to us and making comments and responding. Then we started the video and for about two hours there was a steady stream of students coming by, sometimes in large groups, to get the Proclamation and Declaration, to ask questions, and to engage with the ideas and talk about this idea of the youth having no future under this system.

A lot of questions people asked—about how a revolution could actually be made in a “conservative” and powerful country like this, about what kind of economy and society would actually be better, about totally breaking with this electoral system and not siding with one oppressor or another, about whether there was any escape or safe place to retreat to as the world gets destroyed by this system—were answered right in the Proclamation and Declaration. A few people were attracted by the fact that we openly called ourselves revolutionary communists. Actually, quite a few people in and around UT consider themselves “revolutionaries,” even “communists.” One guy who took the Declaration walked away, started reading it, and came back to tell us that he really appreciated that it names Russia and China as other imperialist powers. He expressed frustration that so many people he meets "on the left" unquestioningly support Russia and China and don't recognize that they are also capitalist-imperialist powers.

We were inspired and provoked by Atlas's polemic on the most recent RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, and mentioned to people as they came up to talk to us, "You are hearing the voice of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian" and in different ways tried to bring out the work he has done to "rescue the possibility of revolution," root out poisonous notions of ends justifies the means from the communist project, write the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America which is highlighted in the Declaration, and other points, depending on what was being raised in conversation. (Summing it up later, it maybe would have been better if we said you're hearing the voice of Bob Avakian, the most important revolutionary leader and thinker in the world today—and provoked people with that.) We wanted people to walk away with an appreciation of the leadership we have—though the whole question of leaders and leadership, and the slander people will encounter about BA, will need to be taken on more explicitly and fiercely.

And although most people didn’t watch the State of Emergency video from start to finish, BA’s voice in the background and the content of what he was saying was part of the whole pole of attraction. That night we sold two T-shirts and throughout the day got 118 packets of the Declaration and Proclamation into people’s hands. Posters on the UT drag get taken down pretty quickly by UT, so this area needs to be hit often. We also want to get these under the doors of professors and student organizations as well as posted on the campus itself.

All this points to a need and potential to repolarize this campus and put revolution on the map there with a consistent presence and saturation. One thing we are struggling with in general is the follow-up to find out what people think of what they’ve read and heard, and getting people to go from a few minutes of engagement to being involved in this mission to put revolution on the map from the get-go, along with consistent engagement that can actually develop into revolutionary organization and leadership.

But overall, it was a great day where a lot of components did come together in the ways we wanted.

Onward.