People who know me or know this blog know that the Bob Avakian cult popped up.into my sphere a couple of yeats ago after I had forgotten about them for a few decades. You also know that I have not taken them too seriously and that I find alot of their antics to be clownish, even ludicris. And so perhaps they are.
They do originate in Marxism and while I don'ttake them all that seriously they are very serious indeed. They want a revolution to change the world and put an end to injustice. It wasn't a surprise to hear that they had sent a delegation to Ferguson, Missouri to participate in their own way in the protests against police anti Black violence which the police responded to with highly visible snipers, tear gas, flash bang grenades, lies, smokebombs and arrests.
Not too surprisingly some people threw objects at police and some people broke into stores and took things. Given the media's propensity to muddy up reality it's not shocking that they tried to tie the minimal law violations done by civilians in Ferguson to these self proclaimed revolutionary communists.
I wanted to see what the Avakianites had to say for themselves and you can see it too if you google revcom.
"It's the epistomolovy, yo" Bob Avakian
I kind of figured that the media had picked a bogey man to try and deflect from the fact that a cop has murdered an unarmed Black man, as happens over and over in our country and this killer cop is still on the payroll and at large (though in hiding) and that the state response to legitimate protest was a wagon load of vilence. The cops slide from lie to lie trying to justify this crime
In the pages of revcom I found out that almost all the arrests in Ferguson were for failure to disperse and were not for looting. Well, we all need to fail dispersing at least untl the recent cop murderers are locked up. Free people are not told by their servants to disperse.
Looking deeper into revcom I found a riff by Bob Avakian full of Epistomology, yo, and self referential to the max. This riff brought me back to a night when I found myself in Madison Square Garden listening to Werner Ehrhard riff on how everyone in the place ought to write a check payable in the amount of five hundred dollars to his ororganization. Now he didn't put it that way. In fact the truth was that while each of his words sounded like it rightly followed its predecessor and yet, had I not known from the start about the checks, well, I would not have had even the vaguest idea what it was that Mr. Ehrhard was driving at.
I know that Mr. Avakian is aiming to lead a revolution and thetefore put an end to all injustice and human suffering. He believes this can take place pretty pronto here in North America because it is sorely needed. He wants his intrepid bandnof followers to "work on the contradictions" that pop up in this tumultuous era. He must have more to say than that since there are over seven hours of video featuring the thoughts of Mr. Avakian, videos that were shown at the Magic Johnson theater in Harlem to a dissapointingly small audience some year or more ago.
