Come hear a talkback to a PowerPoint of a cassette tape of an essay by Bob Avakian! Would you like to attend a screening of a Betamax of a Super 8 of a lecture by Bob Avakian?
Maybe you’ve seen the volunteers in their black T-shirts, handing out Revolution newspaperoutside left conferences and protests. Or perhaps you’ve seen the posters, the sandwich boards, the flyers with their gummed-up tape. You can find them near wherever Revolution Books are sold, which happens to be exactly two places, three thousand miles apart, one where I grew up and one where I live now.
I pass Revolution Books in Berkeley almost every day on my way to work, and every time I do — skimming these advertisements for new presentations in obsolete media, their degraded quality a sign of purported integrity — I strain to forget that I used to sit at the other Revolution Books, in New York, many hours a week. I did so, you might say voluntarily, as part of the Youth Brigade of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), between 2003 and 2004, from age 12 to 14 — unless the Party is a cult, an open question, in which case I was in a cult as a preteen. And like most cult members, I was pretty devoted.
I ask my friend Jeff: Do you want to hear about when I was in RevCom as a kid? He replies honestly, flagging down the bartender, “I don’t know, not really, it scares me — I avoided that fate. Is Avakian even alive?” To induce him, I tell him it includes the story of my first orgasm, on a beach at the Jersey Shore. In what format? The microfiche of sex: dry humping.
I was the youngest of the Youth Brigade. They recruited me outside my middle school in 2003 — two attractive late teens, one woman, one man. My middle school building also housed a high school, and the recruiters looked just like the high school students, leaning up against the scaffolding.
The man was particularly handsome. I was, let’s just say, not. I’d been hit by a car in downtown Brooklyn the year before, reducing my life to absolute control by my parents, and I’d spent my time of less freedom building a chaotic identity. I began reading the New York School poets after my mother joked that I might feel an affinity with Frank O’Hara, whohad also been hit by a car (I did, but it was a dune buggy, and he died). I wore a single knee-high combat boot on the good leg; the cast, on the other, was foot to groin and medical blue. Despite the indisputable fact that they sucked, I wore an Anti-Flag sweatshirt (their music was banned in many stores post–September 11: solidarity); Fugazi — good — graced the Walkman. My hair was magenta and I could recite Howl nose to tail, as I often did, trailing my sometimes boyfriend Max on crutches while he stole books from the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Returning now to the relative mobile freedom I once enjoyed, I started smoking. My first cigarette was, naturally, a clove. I would say I was a world-historically embarrassing preteen, except they all are. Their earnest desire to know the world and reconfigure themselves in relation to that new knowledge is what makes them powerful. Anyway, who I was becoming was the least of my concerns. We were at war.
I was lonely, despite Max and despite smoking, which facilitated interactions but not new friendship. I was angry. I was “convincible.” I wanted purpose and discipline without yet knowing it. Recruiters know how to read for these feelings in strangers, to pick up on signs both explicit and enigmatic: the sloped shoulders, the spacing of bodies. People who recruit recruiters know they must be attractive and approachable, and youth recruiters must be young enough not to raise alarms but old enough to know how to recruit.
The woman’s name was Fury.1 The man’s name was Fitil. I did not know that this was not his government name, or that fitil means a fuse or a spark,or that spark was an allusion to the Spark (Iskra), Lenin’s newspaper until he was pushed out by the Mensheviks. I would learn these things before the year was out.
Fitil asked me and my classmates what we thought about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’d watched them on our parents’ TVs, much like we’d watched the replays of September 11, despite having watched the events in real time out the window at school two years before. Recently we’d walked out of class to protest the wars, meeting thousands of other children in the street. We were horrified, we answered. What gave us away? Probably my sweatshirt. I think the other kids went on to lunch, but I kept talking to Fitil. He asked me if I wanted to come to a meeting in Chinatown later in the week for like-minded people, a youth group. I said yes.
I don’t remember much about that first meeting, set up in a sad, multipurpose office building above the East Broadway F stop, beyond that it was basic recruitment. There were snacks, nice people, a place to talk about the war when it seemed no one was, at least not in the negative. I was no longer a weird kid who wouldn’t shut up; everyone else was that, too. There was some talk about the “RNC,” which I gathered was important without being able to decode the abbreviation. There’d be another meeting the following week. I said I’d be back.
Who I was becoming was the least of my concerns. We were at war.
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Things moved quickly from there. I had seen the movie Freaks and thought I knew what it meant to join, for others to want you to join, but I didn’t see it in front of me then, even though the RCP chorus was barely more subtle. Run with us! I did, and running with them felt like coming home, a feeling I would lose, miss ardently, and feel again only twenty years later when I moved to the Bay. It wasn’t merely that I now belonged to a group, though that was part of it. It was that this group’s work was to name the violence of our shared conditions, and no one else wanted to do that with me in my ordinary life. Every time a comrade described “a whole different way the world could be,” I said yes to a different way. Every time they said what was wrong with the world — the police state, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia — I said yes, that was what was wrong. Now, I had to learn how they wanted to get from wrong to the revolution.
To aid in my understanding, I was given the 2001 Draft Programme of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a newly revised handbook spelling out the Party line. (Why the British spelling? Nobody knows.) It was flat-stapled and bound in black-and-red construction paper. A silhouette of armed revolutionary figures graced the cover. I took it home and read it immediately. My mom found it and got very upset. I didn’t understand. My parents were leftists. They had raised me to give away what I didn’t need, to oppose the occupation of Palestine, to militate against the death penalty, to think of abortion as a wonderful medical procedure full stop. But neither of my parents was a militant or a communist, and the manual was indeed both; my mother tossed it in our nonworking fireplace. I fished it out, went to my room, turned the music up, and read it again.
It’s impossible to understand how RevCom became RevCom without tracing the sectarian fissures of the New Left from which it emerged. In early 1968, a group of activists known as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) set out to challenge the Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) dominance within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the main network of New Left campus activists. PLP was born of an earlier split over Mao and China within the Communist Party USA. Through a contorted anti-Soviet logic, the PLP had come to effectively oppose third world and nationalist struggles like those in Vietnam and in Black America. PLP was putting up numbers, steering SDS less through those numbers than through their discipline, and its members were a loud voice on the New Left. BARU, with its commitment to the Black Panther Party, said: Enough of that.
How BARU decided to step to PLP is a matter of disagreement. One comrade said it was “grandiosity created by a few too many beers one evening.” Another, the young Bob Avakian, said they wrote a “position paper.” Regardless, they went around the nation making common cause with other leftist groups, with whom they formed a coalition called the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM). BARU also began to publish the Red Papers, which worked to clarify their politics and gave birth to the militant aesthetics that would one day win me over. (The cover of volume one features portraits of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Lenin, Mao — and a rifle.)
The tension culminated in 1969 at the SDS national convention in Chicago, when PLP took over SDS and RYM declared itself “the real SDS.” It withdrew from the convention, set up shop across town, and split itself in twain: RYM I became the Weathermen, and RYM II stood for mass communist politics. That’s a lot of acronyms and a lot of splits, but then again, there was a lot to split over: tactics, Stalin, Mao, internationalism, women’s oppression, the role of middle-class college students in fomenting revolution, the role of the working class in the same, third worldism, electoralism, and the Black Panther Party.
Although RevCom wasn’t the only organization channeling youth antiwar sentiment in the streets, it was one of few, and in any case, it found me first.
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One of the groups to come out the other side of RYM II was the Revolutionary Union (RU), to which BARU shortened its name in a bid to expand beyond its home turf. After functioning for several years as the RU, with Avakian on a major central committee, the RU split again, and from one of the shards came the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975. That group — what would be my group — was heavily surveilled, with Avakian having been marked as especially important by J. Edgar Hoover. In their first years under the Party sign, they weathered Mao’s death, another split, and doubled down on their “antirevisionist” (pro-Stalin, anti-Khrushchev, pro-Sino, anti-Soviet) line. Avakian became Chairman. He’s remained in his role ever since, and the Party and his part in it have become synonymous.
Born in 1943, Bob Avakian is a classic ’60s imago: a white, middle-class UC Berkeley student whose politics were first forged in the Free Speech Movement that my employer loves to celebrate in the Free Speech Movement Café where I get coffee most days.2 Avakian was arrested, gained notoriety and legitimacy, and was sent out into the Bay, leaping from on campus to off, moving from middle-class Berkeley to manufacturing Richmond with his comrades. After flirting with electoral politics (he ran for city council, hand painting his antiwar message on his billboards when they were censored) and getting, in the parlance of today, “called in” by Eldridge Cleaver, Avakian doubled down on a new dogma: overthrow the United States by instigating a mass party, a vanguard, for communism now. As historians Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher write in their history, Heavy Radicals, “Of all the original key members [of RevCom] he was the youngest, arguably the most unyielding, and in the end the most tenacious.”
By the time I joined the Youth Brigade, Chairman Bob had long been a leader in exile. He’d fled to France to avoid criminal charges for allegedly assaulting a police officer at a protest in 1979 (the charges were dropped in ’82), and he tended his flock remotely, through the deputies who remained loyal to him and through the media screened at the bookstore. I remember his younger face from those screenings: a bit heavyset, bearded, pageboy hat. (Now, at 82, he’s maybe had plastic surgery and certainly has no eyebrows.) Bob had fashioned himself a charismatic leader — the RCP’s Mao — and was venerated in earnest by Party members. They described him as a genius, a prophet on par with Marx or Lenin, whose “new synthesis” cleared the path for communist revolution.3 To some RCP members, Avakian was everything. But to me, Bob was never the draw. He was too far away, too old. What drew me instead was the group, and the idea that I might contribute to it as part of the Youth Brigade.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB) was founded just after RCP came into its own, at a two-day conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in November 1977. The conference had been scheduled to meet at Kent State, but the gathering was banned from the entire state of Ohio. Still, six hundred or so people attended. The Worker wrote it up as follows:
Youth today face particular problems as they enter society. . . . The imperialist system cannot offer young people a life with a purpose. This contradiction runs smack up against the characteristics of youth: their boldness, their innovativeness, their hatred of hypocrisy, their desire to change the world. . . . The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade will help channel this rebellious spirit and mobilize youth to fight back against the attacks coming down on them and against the ruling class which launches those attacks.
By the time Fitil and Fury began to channel my spirit, the RCP and RCYB were already anachronisms, vestiges of the conjuncture of ’68 that had somehow survived in the cells of the group for the intervening thirty years. The Party did, however, find me at precisely the alchemical moment I began to desire to change the world and saw the fewest limits to doing so. That moment happened to be a weak one for the American left. By 2003, being antiwar had gone from being an obvious and available position to an ever more marginal one, to the point that even the Nation published an op-ed telling people to stay home and not make trouble, and if they came out to protest Bush, to do so by holding a vigil. The President told us to keep consuming and stop thinking. My godsister took me to see the Dixie Chicks and I knew there was a price to pay for saying you were against invasion — even if that price was, for the ordinary person, less severe than appearing naked on the cover of Entertainment Weekly with the words DIXIE SLUTS and SADDAM’S ANGELS stamped on your body. Although RevCom wasn’t the only organization channeling youth antiwar sentiment in the streets, it was one of few, and in any case, it found me first.
The first section of the Draft Programme I was instructed to read was called “Youth in the Revolution,” and I returned to it like a prayer. It said that young people were innovators — “more critical, more daring, and less weighed down by the ‘force of habit’” than adults — and that “Communists cherish this, and seek to both unleash and give conscious expression to these qualities.” The section’s promise that young people’s lives under socialism would be “an exciting mix of stimulating education and productive labor; a wide variety of cultural and recreational activities; and most of all, front-line participation in the most crucial political struggles of the day” was certainly appealing. But even more so was the line that youth would be “a revolutionizing force throughout the entire socialist transformation to communism.” It confirmed for me that the Party needed me. I already knew I needed it.
Young recruits make ideal pupils: their minds are curious, their bodies likely tireless (and later, strong, for armed struggle), and their pasts, by definition, brief: no one needs to worry that much about a 12-year-old’s commitment to her bourgeois life, let alone about her being a Fed. (The memory of COINTELPRO was not distant for RevCom, and the group was serious about security culture.) The Party’s “Central Task,” according to the Draft Programme, was to “prepare the masses,” psychologically and organizationally, to seize power when the moment of revolutionary crisis arrived. Young people were the easiest demographic to prepare — hence the Youth Brigade.
I started going to Revolution Books a lot. I still showed up to meetings in Chinatown, where four or five teenagers sat around a conference table while a Party member described the dictatorship of the proletariat to us, and explained how it might spare us twenty years of imperial war to come, but I was more interested in the bookstore, where a regular crowd of thirty-odd adults gathered on weeknights for meetings and talkbacks. A good third of the regulars wore RevCom T-shirts, the Party’s signature black with orange-gradient all caps that said things like BA Speaks: REVOLUTION — NOTHING LESS! (I was given a Youth Brigade shirt early on, and I wore it, too, because I loved it.) About once a week, the folding chairs were dragged into rows in front of a projector screen for a viewing of some Avakian-related material: an old lecture by Avakian on Mao, or a contemporary video of Avakian in France directly addressing the camera with his thoughts on the Iraq war, or some black-and-white footage of Richmond, California, where Avakian had embedded in the ’60s. We watched what was probably a rough cut of Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, a concert-film-style edit of Avakian’s first public lecture in the United States since 1979, which was billed as a “wide ranging revolutionary journey.” There were readings, too — all texts by Avakian.
That this programming was inward facing did not strike me as unusual, nor did the persistent focus on Bob. I was entranced by what was there in the room. RevCom was still finalizing the 2001 Draft Programme, the first major revision of its platform since 1975, and disagreements periodically broke out about the contents of this 32-page manual and its 107-page appendix.4 As a child of divorce, I worried these little frictions between comrades would spell The End, but they only seemed to make everyone stronger, more devoted, more in lockstep. Their discipline exhilarated me. So did getting keyed into the social dramas of the group: the revolutionary loves unfolding around the room, the dyads of best friendship, the members who used to be close and now remained apparently comradely but nothing else. I attended regularly and hung around outside after. I was, in a word, absorptive.
I was, let me repeat, a child, so I had a lot of time.
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Soon I could faithfully regurgitate the Party position. We believe in a dictatorship of the proletariat. We believe there needs to be a world without America. We believe, to accomplish that, there must be a full revolution and nothing less. We are Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. (MLM for short. There was much emphasis on this.) The Maoist is to join with the middle and push the middle left, to join the working class and push the working class forward. We believe we need a vanguard. We believe we are that vanguard.
At the dinner table, I explained revisions the antirevisionist Party had made and told my parents that we did, in fact, live in a police state. I told them that the future was mine, if I wanted it, and it sounded eerily close to what they had always said — that I could do anything I wanted if I put my mind to it — but with a twist. I didn’t want to become a doctor; I was becoming a revolutionary. After a particularly nasty fight about the Draft Programme, my stepfather flipped over a card table in rage.
As I became more adamant about the rev and the RevComs both, my mother had an idea. It was brilliant, if not in the way she thought. Grasping at straws, she sent me to see Donald Nicholson-Smith, a friend of my parents who I thought of as my communist “uncle.” I didn’t know he was a translator of the Situationists, or that there were many kinds of communist, some of whom violently disagreed with one another, and that my group hated the kind of communist he was. (RevComs were all about mass movement and the party form; the Situationists were basically the opposite, focused on spontaneous uprising.) What I did know is that Donald’s stories of ’68 in France and England had fascinated me. His favorite chant from those days — “hot chocolate / drinking chocolate!” — thrilled me in its post-Situationist enigma, its pure prosody, its silliness.
I had already started making appeals to him to intervene on my behalf when my parents thought my nascent politics too left. Now my mother sent me to him to get deprogrammed. Serving me lunch in his apartment, he told me that there was nothing wrong and, rather, something right about being a communist. I should just actually learn what it meant when I said I was now a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. He offered to explain a little, but really, like any good teacher, he wanted me to learn for myself. He then sent me home with twenty books on Mao in shopping bags. My mother helped me carry them to my room, where I shut my door and got to work once again.
Some of my receptivity to Donald’s syllabus could be chalked up to good timing. I had maxed out on the Draft Programme. It was short, direct, and digestible, but for all that it still seemed to contain hidden meanings, and I struggled to follow its internal logic. Three of Avakian’s first books were about Mao. Perhaps, to understand Avakian, I would have to understand Mao. I wasn’t being deprogrammed; I was turning to deeper scripture.
After two months of reading, I had questions. I returned to Revolution Books and put them to the same people who had recruited me. Their answers were, I am ashamed to say, salutary. I was highly persuadable in the presence of people I loved. Then I sheepishly asked the thing that had kept me up at night for a few weeks. This question wasn’t like my earlier queries in response to a nontechnically rendered Marxist-Leninist-Maoism. I turned to Fury, whom I trusted.
“OK, but my parents, obviously, are bourgeois,” I whispered. “Psychoanalysts.” I had just read, in immense detail, how the Cultural Revolution went down, and somehow already knew how things had gone in the Soviet case. (Not well.) I didn’t mention that I loved my parents, but I did. “Will they have to die,” I asked, “when the revolution comes?”
She looked shocked. “Yes?” she said, maybe she was unsure, or perhaps she was sure but didn’t want to scare me off. I cried, but I didn’t leave.
Over the course of 2003, our work moved in two directions my mind couldn’t exactly reconcile, even though I was now officially a student of contradiction. On the one hand, we were preparing for something that seemed so far away as to boggle my mind: the following August. The meetings continued, but now we wore shirts that said NOT IN OUR NAME (NION). We were spending less time in Chinatown as the Youth Brigade and at the bookstore as a fuller Party milieu, and more of it in a weird month-to-month space in Koreatown near Herald Square. This was the home of NION’s operations. Fluorescent ceiling lighting, a copy room, cubicles, everything rendered in office gray. Even though it was just comrades in the office, NION was bigger, operating without the baggage of American anticommunist tendencies.
At NION we recited a pledge that didn’t mention communism. Meanwhile, at the bookstore, we recited a different pledge, wore our RevCom shirts, and remained preoccupied with a more distant goal that the adults held out as more important and more possible: the revolution. My time was thus divided between NION and RCYB: stop the war now, prepare for the war to come. This was hard for me to understand. We’re antiwar, but we need a war to get free? Eventually I would learn to say, “No War but Class War.”
NION was supposed to help build out the membership rolls, a slower form of recruiting than I had experienced. (This was a tactic, and a widespread one with a history: ANSWER, the other antiwar group doing numbers, was also kind of a front, but for the Workers World Party, which had its own (recently deceased) charismatic leader, Sam Ballan a.k.a. Sam Marcy. NION’s program looked like that of any other liberal humanist antiwar group, joining with other groups from time to time to make what I learned was called a “collation.” It was so liberal as to court celebrity endorsement — from Larry Flynt, Phil Lesh, Angela Davis, Diane di Prima, Al Sharpton, Wallace Shawn, Fredric Jameson, Toni Morrison, Edward Said, Deepak Chopra, a few sitting congressmen and one former senator. Were a few of these people moved by New Communism? Certainly. Were some involved in some SDS offshoot at one point? Sure. Did they all think Bob Avakian was “the most important political thinker and leader in the world today”? No chance.
I was, let me repeat, a child, so I had a lot of time. My parents accepted that I was volunteering for NION and knew some, if not all, of my whereabouts. School got out at twenty minutes past three, my parents worked till eight, and having largely aged out of after-school programs, I was able to go where I pleased until 7 or 8 PM when I needed to be home. Where I pleased was with my comrades. I’d walk over from Chelsea and log on.
What needed doing? By me, low-level things. Stickering (one circular with a globe and one rectangular, NION and RCP respectively), flyering, calling places (“Hello, this is Hannah calling on behalf of Not In Our Name, do you have a minute to talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?”), picking things up, confirming speakers for meetings, fundraising, sending emails. (I was good at email; I’d been using a computer for five years to talk to strangers on AIM under the handle Dolphingirl1212.)
At the office and the bookstore, I made new friends, all in their early twenties. Friendship and romance don’t get the job done, but they will get it started and keep it going. Basically no one was a creep, which I cannot say of the poets I befriended in my later teens, or the academics after that. Everyone knew I was a Youth. That was the point. It was enshrined in the manual. I started sleeping over at the apartments of these same people, including Fury and Fitil. They set up little nests on the floor for me to bed down in, and they’d have long tactical conversations during which I fell asleep, mouth open. Their baby. I don’t know where my parents thought I was; I may have lied that I was with a girl from school, or else at my father’s apartment, then lied to him that I was with my mom. We’d wake up at 5 AM, hop on a train, and ride it all the way to the Bronx and back down again in pairs to hand out flyers. I got to know this little group pretty well walking between the cars, which my parents never let me do and which pleased me greatly, stopping to talk with commuters about the RNC and where they could join up with NION.
There was a man who called himself Yosef Steele, Yo-Yo for short (I also thought this was his government name). There was another guy just called Joe. There was Carl Marcus; I loved his giant tattoos proclaiming UNITY STRUGGLE UNITY without irony, and learned this was the method by which comrades engaged one another, the reason why fights seemingly never resulted in dissolution. There was Julia, who played den mother, whom I still run into at demos in Oakland as an adult (and hide from, with shame for abandoning her when I left the Party). She bought me lunch when I showed up at the office on weekends and asked me questions about school. There was yet another Joey, handsome and soft-spoken, with a girlfriend I found shrill and intense — an odd couple whom I studied. Joey was the one who taught me about government names when I loudly greeted him in the street. “NEVER YELL ANYONE’S NAME,” he shouted, then quietly, “Not even if it’s not their real name.” The volume alone, uncharacteristic, shook me. So did his ability to stop his anger on a dime so that he could teach me. This was my first lesson in security culture (though it didn’t hurt us that everyone was called Joe). It’s also when I realized I didn’t know the so-called government names of most of the people I’d devoted a year to. This changed nothing in me.
This was hard for me to understand. We’re antiwar, but we need a war to get free?
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Of course, I wasn’t just embedded in the RevComs; I was enmeshed in my family, and I sought ways to bring the two together. At some point I persuaded my parents to hire my comrades into positions of care for me and my younger brothers. Everyone was broke, I wanted to be of use, and the only use I had was my parents. This logic seemed sound. Julia and Fury thus both babysat, and my brothers loved them as much as I did. My parents thought they were friends from NION, which they were, too. My parents are also highly persuadable in the presence of people they love, and they love to be of help. (The next year they would hire two broke friends I made in Washington Square Park to teach my brothers how to play the harmonica on my say-so.)
By summer more and more comrades were arriving, from Ohio and Pennsylvania and Hawaii. I started to learn about non-rev things: weed, Dead Prez, sex. I was turning 14 and heading for high school that fall. The revolution was a horizon, but the RNC was actually approaching. After school let out, I hung out at the office more or less from nine to five, sending emails for adults who still called it the Net. A boy my age, Sam, joined, and finally I had an exact peer. I loved him ferociously. A photo of the two of us would end up on the cover of several New York dailies covering the RNC protests, our NION pins and shirts proudly displayed, the thick, shiny swoop of his hair falling platonically into my shagged-out curls.
At a NION event I met a boy named Ardor. Was that his government name? I still don’t know. His parents were artists and artists name their kids all kinds of things, including synonyms for passion. He was an artist, too, and 19, which now I would say was too old. Sent to summer camp for a month, I called Ardor every night to cry about missing a crucial moment in our Brigade’s plans. I was Rev-sick, clutching my Walkman and crying on my cot.
Right before the RNC, my father insisted I spend a few nights with him down at the Jersey Shore. This was bad timing — I had just returned. I felt needed, but mostly I couldn’t go through the pain of separation again. I begged Ardor to join, and he did. That’s where the dry humping happened, on that grody beach, waves crashing, zippers and denim exacerbating our conditions, offering enough friction for me to come.
Once August hit, a call went out for housing. People were coming in from everywhere to do a final push to get people in the streets, to swell our numbers. (RevCom had a network of members across cities, something I did not know at the time, and I surmise now that if I had stayed in the Party I might have been asked to move into an apartment with other RevComs, to relocate to recruit new members, and to agitate wherever I was needed.) We wanted a big turnout, we wanted a million people, and we needed seemingly every working New Yorker to encounter a RevCom on their morning commute. I asked my parents to put a “NION” activist up, and they agreed. One day, a sweet emo artist named Johnny from the Bay moved in; I lugged the futon from my room to a makeshift space for him. In exchange, he painted over the storybook characters that surrounded me when I slept and drew neo-Victorian silhouettes of each of my closest comrades carrying posters. When my mom saw it for the first time, she gave me a tight smile and said, “Great, Hannie.”
My parents went out of town one weekend, taking my brothers. A rarity. Most kids would have had their friends over, and so I did — my coms. We had a tiny party in my room, under our silhouettes of us marching, which we hadn’t yet done. Atomic, a Hawaiian poet, asked if he could write me a poem. Before I could answer fully, he got out a Sharpie, stood on my bed, and wrote on the ceiling:
AND VICTORIOUS BE
THE WAR SONGS WE SING
AND FILLED WITH THE TRUTH
IN ORDER TO BRING
HOPE TO THE HOPELESS
BECAUSE THE REVOLUTION AIN’T POINTLESS
SO WHEN THIS SHIT HITS THE FAN
ON WHOSE SIDE WILL YOU STAND
POISED TO STRIKE WITH A RIFLE
NOT A BIBLE IN HAND
OR WILL YOU DIE WHERE YOU SIT
ON THE EMPEROR’S LAND
BECAUSE UNDER THIS SYSTEM
YOU’RE A SLAVE NOT A MAN
I think I fell asleep, cross-faded (a term I had recently acquired, already useful), wondering how I’d explain this poem to my parents. I would sleep under it on and off until I was 23, boyfriends and girlfriends looking up at it, asking why it was there. I’d roll over and pretend to be asleep.
My parents were OK with my spending the week of the RNC in the street. I’d been tasked with leading a rally for a feeder march at Union Square, an assignment that made me feel like I was taken seriously. I had to address a crowd for the first time, and I was nervous.
The RNC was in Madison Square Garden. Our demo was in Union Square. Both my parents were somewhere in the crowd, avoiding each other. Even the NYPD surmised that we had a crowd of forty thousand at this single feeder rally (RevCom’s rule was take the police number and double it). After my speech, on the Front-for-the-Party line, and after I had run through the contemporary horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan, I led the crowd in chant — whipping them up. It worked. I could see my mother and her friend in the crowd, stunned at first, and then screaming. And then I read our “Pledge to Resist”:
We believe that as people living
in the United States it is our
responsibility to resist the injustices
done by our government, in our namesNot in our name
will you wage endless war
there can be no more deaths
no more transfusions of blood for oilNot in our name
will you invade countries
bomb civilians, kill more children
letting history take its course
over the graves of the namelessNot in our name
will you erode the very freedoms
you have claimed to fight forNot by our hands
will we supply weapons and funding
for the annihilation of families
on foreign soilNot by our mouths
will we let fear silence usNot by our hearts
will we allow whole peoples
or countries to be deemed
evilNot by our will
and Not in our name . . .
I headed out from the plywood stage, into the street, up from the Square’s north side, across from the Barnes & Noble Max had spent so much time robbing. After that, my comrades jokingly called me Emma. I thought: I am almost in enough to shed the name Hannah for good. Emma would be my Joe.
But there were limits to my in. The abbreviations of DA (direct action) and CD (civil disobedience) were not strange to me, but no one wanted to babysit “the kid” or teach her how to get arrested. The thing about the RNC protests was that the cops were terrifying. They acted indiscriminately. With hundreds of thousands of people, if not the million we had hoped, a multiplicity of tactics was deployed, and sometimes they clashed: a street theater group brought a giant dragon; anarchists lit it on fire and the police rushed in. A kettle here, and suddenly forty of my friends were gone, held for seventy-two hours in a former bus garage whose floor was covered in motor oil, asbestos, and chemical solvents. (It was dubbed the Guantánamo on the Hudson, and after a decade of legal battles, the City paid out nearly $18 million to the protesters detained there.) I saw the rashes on their legs when they were released into our arms at vigils outside the jails. Then back to it. Another net there, another group of comrades gone, and me with them — till I realized how short I was and ducked under the net and ran and ran and ran, while everyone cheered on my escape.
Not long after, I ghosted the Party.
No one needs me to say what happened next. Bush was reelected. Four more years and twenty of war, or more. It seemed, to me, the sun had set on the communist horizon without us getting any closer to it.
I got put on secret probation at my new high school for leading another walkout to Union Square, this time with only two hundred people. Fury met us there, and that was the last time I saw her. We gave up the office in Koreatown without a word. Energy was dwindling. The war we wanted would never arrive, and we were stuck with the war we hated. More and more people continued to die.
Finally, I had the thought: What if the way RevCom wants to get from wrong to revolution is itself wrong? We had lost the RNC, let alone the contest for revolution, but why? RevCom self-critiques tend to go as follows: We failed to generate a mass party because of our petit bourgeois individualism — our fears of struggle, our allergy to commitment, and our aversion to the masses we wanted to join. Or, relatedly, we failed because we didn’t want it badly enough, didn’t work hard enough, weren’t in the struggle enough. But I was the very picture of devotion, and so were my coms. If we didn’t win, I knew it wasn’t because we didn’t want it enough. It had to be something else. (And it was — it was history.)
Juliana Spahr writes, “Sometimes it feels like it is over and it’s not. / Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it’s over.” I think that’s what I found most devastating: we had energy, we were just building. Then it turned out I was seriously mistaken about what energy could do and what could be built. We might call this the psychic experience of demobilization.
I stopped reciting Atomic’s poem while lying under it, from memory, with my eyes closed. I had more and more hours to put in at school, and I tried to make friends there. Sam left the Party, too. We realized we had friends in common in high school and kept hanging out. We never spoke of it; I can only say I was worried our friends would judge us for being comrades.
When I tell my friends about my time in the RevComs now, I can see their discomfort. For a 14-year-old, already a two-year veteran of the cause, to have run that way is seen as, well, intense. In truth, I was spared the worst. I joined young and left young. It would take another decade for me to begin to see the Party both with adult eyes and from the outside. I wasn’t in denial about its complexities, its history, or its reliance on the cult of personality; it had simply vanished from my consciousness the way the discarded, cringey obsessions of preadolescence do. (I never thought about Anti-Flag again.) The Party came back on my radar in the early 2010s, first at Occupy, and again after Trayvon Martin was murdered. There they stood, as ever in their black T-shirts, handing out copies of Revolution. Across the square, I pointed and said, “I used to run with them.” My new comrades lowered their eyes, muttering something about Chairman Bob (pejorative).
This was when I learned that the RevComs have a reputation, like an old joke still successfully played for laughs. Stemming from their attempt to answer the great question posed by ’68 — How do we get to communism? — well into the 21st century, the joke succeeds because they remain in a durational fight, one that requires them to be hardcore. In turn, they require great discipline of their membership, which amounts to a life of isolation and commitment. The dissonance between their devotion and the person to whom they are devoted creates the interval needed for humor. All this, for him? But it wasn’t a joke at all: I would eventually hear about comrades known and unknown to me who had had crushing experiences within the closed ranks of the group. I was probably lucky to get out when I did.
After I told my comrade Jeff about my time in RevCom, he warned that they would find me again, despite my moving, my own multiple names. “Like scientologists,” he said. I told him I got an email from Bob Avakian weekly, sent right to spam. But he wasn’t wrong. Recently someone from Revolution Books, near where I work, emailed me, and the email wasn’t exactly form:
Dear Professor,
I read an article about the UC protest yesterday that mentioned you.
I blanched. I had read Mahmoud Khalil’s letter, dictated from detention, on Sproul Plaza the day before, just after a colleague had read Mario Savio’s famous statement, delivered sixty-one years ago from those same steps. Yes, I had given my name, given my title. The media had been there, and with this aid RevCom had found me. Or so I thought. The writer hoped to inform me about an upcoming protest, “to introduce (or reintroduce)” me to Bob Avakian’s writings on fascism, and to “ask for financial support to spread Avakian’s work.” It went on for eight more paragraphs, urging me to take fascism seriously. “It has happened before,” the recruiter wrote, “and it can happen again.”
I read the malignant time loop differently when the email came to its final ask. Would I speak on behalf of RevCom at a rally the following week? Twenty years ago, I was asked this question and said yes. I said “Not in my name,” and meant as an American. Now I was asked to do so once more, and as a Jew. I closed out my email and tried to shake off the feeling that I was living my life over again. In a way, I was. Maybe RevCom was emailing me now for the same reason they’d recruited me on the street two decades ago. Or maybe, I entertained for a moment, they could re-find me because they trained me. In reality, they hadn’t found me so much as they’d found someone.
There may be another child out there whose experience in the RevComs produced a bildungsroman whose destination was liberalism. There may be another child whose parents loved them as my parents did me, and who sought to continue in their politics exactly. There may be another who came to their politics in a seminar room, read Marx for the first time, and felt a rupture. And there may be yet another who never got out, who left their family for the family of comrades. Me, I had Fury and Fitil and all that followed from there, even if it meant leaving them to find my horizon once more. Everyone comes to their politics somehow, and it may be perverse to be grateful to RevCom for bringing me to mine, but I am, even as I would never go back. There’s no greater gift than that specific belief, the feeling of walking with people who know this is to come, it must, even when they’re wrong; and that through that assertion, we might devote ourselves to ourselves, each for all, and push right over that ever receding edge to the sun. Run with us.
All names of my comrades have been changed. ↩
Last year, when the university celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the movement after cracking down on pro-Palestine protests, RevComs came to the Café and renamed it the “Shut the Fuck Up and Stay in Your Lane Café.” ↩
A visit to the RevCom website—its aesthetics unchanged since I first encountered it—gives a good sense of how this cult of personality is expressed in RCP comms. Avakian’s name appears on the home page sixty times, a monomania not wholly explained by the fact that RevCom doesn’t seem to understand how websites work. “WHY IS BOB AVAKIAN SO IMPORTANT?” a sidebar reads. “Besides the fact that he is the only leader in this country who is talking about a real revolution—and besides the fact that he is actually leading the process of actively working for that revolution—what Bob Avakian (BA) has done, with the development of the new communism, is of world historic importance.” Were this cultic shorthand and circular logic already at this pitch of derangement when I joined RevCom? Probably. But these are the kinds of red flags a 12-year-old might be forgiven for missing. ↩
One major change in the revised Draft Programme was the Party’s “stance on homosexuality.” Queer members were now permitted in the Party, and the theoretical grounds of their previous exclusion—that male homosexuality was an expression of male chauvinism (or just bourgeois) and lesbianism a misguided reaction to oppression under patriarchy—were dismissed. RevCom now opposed the oppression of queer people, but the manual still deployed words like “tricky” to describe queer desire, which, like all things under capitalism, was something to “struggle” with, if not against. I was certainly struggling with my sexuality. ↩
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