Stateside With Rosalea: Revolution in the USA

(In honor of Washington’s Birthday, as today’s holiday is officially known.)

If Imperialist America were trying to create on its own shores a group it could use as a pawn to checkmate any attempt by its citizenry to bring about meaningful change, it could do a lot worse than create the Revolutionary Communist Party. They sent out an email to media organizations in the Bay Area, and Scoop, giving details of a January 31 meeting that was being held in Oakland, but then refused to allow any recording of the event. “Does that mean I can’t write anything,” I asked, “or does it just apply to electronic recording—photos, audio, video?” Writing was allowed. So, in the hope that a thousand-and-a-half words might tell a picture, here’s my report.

The Forum at Laney College is a very neat little auditorium. Built in the shape of a 60-degree arc with the focal point a wall with a projection screen on it, its baffled ceiling reconstitutes and mellows the sound bouncing off the hard brick walls. Seats rise up from the floor space below the screen, where on this day a table is set with three people behind it—a tall white man with short grey hair and mustache, wearing a blue plaid shirt, an older black man in dark clothing and hat, and a middle-aged woman, perhaps Asian or Hispanic, with short hair and glasses.

The entrance to the Forum is from the right rear at the top of the rows of seats, with a fairly wide area going around the curve at the top, leading to steps down to the auditorium floor on the lefthand side. Steps also lead down to the floor area from in front of the entrance. Red tape blocks entry to the top three rows of seats and the bottom two rows, where red tape also extends across the stairwell so only certain people can get to the floor area. The second row of seats from the front also has green tape across all but the center two.

On each side of the tape blocking people from going down to the floor, sit two gentlemen wearing badges saying “Usher”. I don’t know what these four guys are there for, but they sure give the air of being security of some sort. Like the ceiling, I’m baffled. Are they expecting a band of anarchists to storm in? As this page from an anarchist website shows, there is no love lost between anarchists and the RCP.

The anarchist website lists the following front groups of the RCP: World Can't Wait, Not In Our Name, Refuse and Resist, No Business As Usual, La Resistencia, October 22 Coalition Against Police Brutality, Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru. It also states: “Anarchists have criticized the RCP for its reliance on tokenism of people of color to give the organization the appearance of diversity and working class authenticity. Anarchists have criticized the RCP for its use of front groups to intervene in social movements.”

And: “Anarchists have criticized the RCP for its emphasis on leader worship, or being a personality cult, in the case of the RCP that leader is Bob Avakian.” Aah! The mysterious man of unknown whereabouts, Bob Avakian. Search for a recent image of him, and the best you can come up with is an undated, unsourced, and unverifiable picture of Cindy Sheehan and a smiling, jolly man strikingly like Burl Ives.

So, for all I know, the guy who gets up to speak IS Bob Avakian. Except that, instead of having a squeaky, high voice like the one on the Avakian audio excerpts available on the web, this guy has the voice of someone who narrates documentaries on PBS, or does voice-overs for TV commercials selling expensive cars. And put him in a suit, he could be anchoring the network evening news. He is introduced as James Lemond.

Although most of the 100-strong audience is white, he gets right to the nub of why this talk on Making Revolution in the USA is being held now. Quoting Marx’s axiom that capitalism was born with blood dripping from every pore, Lemond says, “Just go one stop down to Fruitvale Bart, where Oscar Grant’s blood was spilled by the system’s hand.” For this is one of the groups, along with the anarchists, who are doing most of the organizing for protests about the New Year’s Day shooting of an unarmed man in the back by a BART police officer, which I commented on in an earlier post.

Lemond later reinforces this theme by calling the riots in Los Angeles that followed the not guilty verdict given for the police officers who were videoed beating Rodney King, “the L.A. Rebellion of 1992”. “The weakest and most oppressed in society form the most solid base for revolution,” he says. Scorning both the “gangsta mindset and its twin brother, mindless religion” as having failed young blacks, Lemond asserts “The system has no future for these youth; the revolution does,” and refers to the presence of a large section of poor people of color in the military as “the Imperialists’ Achilles heel.”

“The struggle against the murder of Oscar Grant is so important now,” Lemond says, “because it can expose the system to millions” and be part of the strategy for making revolution. All of which might sound rather rabble-rousing as you read it on the screen, but he is merely reading a long treatise that is so dry even the diehard revolutionaries in the audience applauded enthusiastically an hour into it when he said, “Enough is enough!”, thinking the lecture had come to an end.

Mercifully, after about 90 minutes it does, and he and the other two top-tablers are led away to a separate room by the man with the “Staff” badge who’d sat himself down two seats away from me at the beginning. There’s a ten-minute break while written questions are collected, and people mingle or leave, then the three return. Lemond has trouble curbing the length of his answers to the questions, and again reinforces that “We need to spread a culture of defiance, resistance, revolution” because it “provides air to breathe for people at the bottom.”

One question asks whether Chairman Avakian will be doing a speaking tour. Clyde Young,--who came across the RCP while in prison, later met Bob Avakian and is now a spokesperson—replied that “it’s very important to build a wall around him so he isn’t taken down”, which would be like having the “heart ripped out” of the movement. Avakian “represents the bridge between the Communist Revolution of the past and the Communist Revolution of the future,” Young said, so “you’d want him to speak to thousands at a time, which is a strategic problem.”

The third person on the panel, Dolly Veale, who has been in the RCP since 1975, was particularly interested in pushing the distribution of their newspaper, once called Revolutionary Worker, but now called just Revolution. She especially called for people to take the newspaper into women’s prisons and high schools. I wonder to myself why, with so many people losing their homes and jobs, they aren’t pushing to hand it out at unemployment offices and throwing it on the lawns of homes with Foreclosure Sale signs outside.

Which brings me back to my opening assertion that the RCP might just as well be a front group for “Imperialist America” because so long as their revolution is fueled along race lines it will forever be channeled by the media into pitting one group of poor people against another. Race is the revolutionaries’ Achilles heel, especially in Obamerica, where everyone wants so desperately to put all that behind them.

I leave the event before they’ve finished answering the questions, and as I wait at the bus stop notice a police helicopter doing several circuits overhead. Perhaps they’re expecting a big march to follow, I think, but later on the evening news I learn that there was a demonstration at a BART station not far away about an hour later, and it was led by a young man wearing an AKBooks beanie. Anarchists!—“The results of the sins of the communists”, Lemond calls them.

Well, I guess both the Revolutionary Communist Party and the anarchists score points at least for not being political parties, but, really, who do they think they’re fooling?

(If you’d like to comment on this story, I’ve also posted it on PNN.)

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--

© Scoop Media