“If You Could, Would You?”
[Excerpted from A Guide to This Issue of Revolution]
What You Need to Know and Engage This Week
About the World and Revolution: In This Issue October 31, 2022]
If you could meet a great revolutionary thinker and leader—if you could go up and close and personal with them, finding out what they think about key issues in the world, how they see making revolution, how they look at some of the most controversial questions and sacred cows in society… as well as how they came to be the way they are… if you could go one-on-one with them and hear what they thought about humanity, about friendship, about poetry—about everything that goes into making life worth living—would you?
Well, beginning this week, you can.
This week a new three-part interview with Bob Avakian, the most important thinker and leader on the planet today, premieres. In a very real way, you’ll get to meet Bob Avakian, BA, through these interviews. As the title says, you get a sense, and more than a sense, of the heart and soul, the core of this leader… and you get a sense—a deep sense—of what it means to be hard-core for revolution. This interview is real as hell, it’s scientific, and you’ll come out the other end with a sense of how we could, together, in our hundreds and thousands now and eventually in our millions, go to work on wrenching hope out of what seems every day to be a more and more hopeless situation—through revolution.
These are heavy times—times of international war and talk of nuclear war… times of bitter, irreconcilable conflict within the U.S. and talk of civil war and fascist coups… of fundamental rights stripped away or under severe attack… and of an environmental catastrophe growing more extreme every day. And yet, overwhelmingly, people are turning away or—when they do look—either telling themselves stories about how there’s nothing much you can do about it, or somehow convincing themselves “it won’t really be that bad.”
It’s like we’re living in the movie Don’t Look Up… in spades.
Because it will be “that bad.” Unless… unless we who do care confront the reality and on that basis dig within it to find the way out. The heart of that work—of that analysis—has been done by BA, most prominently 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. But it remains on us to take it up, to fight to make it real… to follow that leadership that’s been provided.
Winning others to take this path—and we DO need to win others, first in their thousands and then in their millions—will take struggle—struggle that will challenge what people think they know or what they want to believe. Watching these interviews is a crucial step—the most crucial step right now—in that process.
Struggling with People
In discussing these upcoming interviews on a recent RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less! YouTube show, co-host Andy Zee said that “one of the things that makes these interviews so important is what is concentrated in them. The scope of what BA concerns himself with and conveys in these interviews—is radically different than how most people are currently thinking. It is even different than what most people are looking for. So there is a lot of work to do—all of us together.”
That means pushing against all the ways that people are avoiding or refusing to “go there.” The obstacles in people’s thinking need to be surfaced, even if people don’t explicitly raise them in response to the promotion we are doing. We need to very sharply and explicitly draw out the difference between what BA is about, and all the other leaders and frameworks that keep things locked inside this system. People raise that they are uncomfortable with one leader, that this smacks of “cult” and “dictator,” that “the people are the real leaders,” that no one who is Black—or Latino, or female, or transgender—is going to (or should) follow an old white guy. Well, there are answers to all that “stuff” and more—answers which are addressed on this site, often by BA himself (see “Bob Avakian Speaks to ‘Cult’: A Ridiculous, Ignorant, and Irresponsible Accusation,” “BIPOC Leadership: There Is No Such Thing,” “Once Again on Why All Dictatorships Are Not Bad, and Why We Should Want, and Fight for, a Socialist Dictatorship”).
But right now, the main argument to wage with people is to insist they engage with these interviews. What people are going to find in these interviews is a leader who is determined to tell people what’s true about the world we are being forced to live in, and how to get this capitalist-imperialist system off the backs of the people all over the world.
And make no mistake—BA will call out the kind of thinking that leads people to accommodate to the horrible present that is heading into something truly terrible. He is not afraid to lead, and he is not going to condescend or treat the people who need this leadership as though they are incapable, and too fragile, to be struggled with to get straight on what is the problem and the potential for getting out of this.
The point is this: Take these next few days to get ready and take the step to build this as well. Go to the special page with materials and guidance; better yet, if there’s a Revolution Club in your area, get in touch with them, or hit us up on social media (@TheRevcoms), or write to this website (revolution.reports@yahoo.com).
Spread the word.