RevCom: An extremist group wrapped inside advocacy, wrapped inside a pyramid scheme.
An extremist organization tried to capitalize off the public backlash to the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in order to establish a foothold in Washington DC. Ostensibly motivated to support abortion rights, there's a secret agenda underlying their actions. Now, they're trying to again increase their profile off public anger toward Donald Trump.
RevCom (an acryonym for the Revolutionary Communist Party USA) was founded in the 1970s by Bob Avakian, with the avowed objective to overthrow the US government. Avakian was influenced by the personality cults that surrounded Mao and Joseph Stalin, and set out to create his own personality cult in hopes that a Bolshevik-like revolution would establish him at the head of a new communist government in America. RevCom disavows elections and democracy, insisting on the establishment of a Stalinist style communist government through revolution alone.
If you haven't heard of them, then the group has either been highly successful, or a huge failure, depending on the point of view. On one hand, the United States is not poised to fall to a communist revolution. On the other hand, RevCom has operated for decades, and you've likely seen them without knowing it.
Avakian’s chief lieutenant Sunsara Taylor has habitually created a variety of front groups over the years to surreptitiously advance RevCom’s objectives. These various fronts have given RevCom a history that has often resembled a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme to recruit new members and raise money. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations it was The World Can't Wait (WCW), facially opposing alleged fascism by Bush, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2016 Refuse Fascism popped up in the name of opposing Donald Trump. In 2021, with abortion the source of public fury, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) became the new flavor of the communist week. Branding is important to RevCom, to include color associations. Orange is the color of choice for WCW and Refuse Fascism, owing to their overlapping surface causes. Green, on the other hand, is preferred for RU4AR.
Legitimate activist organizations around the country have regularly complained that RevCom hijacks surging hot button issues, raising money in the name of popular causes but engaging in no real activism. Instead, RevCom and its party-masks perpetually churn a cycle of grabbing attention to generate more “donations” and then paying the profits to Avakian and his inner circle. When employing these front organizations RevCom habitually oscillates between initially obscuring, then ultimately acknowledging, the group’s association.
Many critics regard RevCom as a cult surrounding Avakian. And not just because of the group's obsession with his ideas, or the fact that (other than maintaining a holding pattern waiting for an opportunity to actually overthrow the government) the group's activities revolve around raising money to provide Avakian a lavish lifestyle. The group's treatment of its members, and of critics, closely resembles cult-like behavior. Internal questioning or criticism is not well tolerated, and often leads not only to quick expulsion, but being publicly harassed. In the age of social media, external critics have also been targeted for harassment. Members of front organizations are pressured to embrace Avakian's communist doctrine, and to fund the group's activities themselves. They don’t reach the level of Scientologists when it comes to harassing fallen angels, but they follow in their direction.
RevCom's tactics regularly involve recruiting young people of high school and college age, in an attempt to harness their naivety and energy. Often recruits are organized into small cells that are isolated from others. These recruits are then sent into the public with instructions to engage in shocking, attention grabbing, and even illegal antics in the name of raising awareness, while also being expected to collect donations that are to be remitted to higher levels up the pyramid. During one such stunt last summer, under the Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights moniker, a teenaged Julianne D’Eredita stripped during a service at Joel Olsteen’s megachurch in her native state of Texas, then loudly shouted in favor of abortion rights. Days later D’Eredita traveled to Washington DC where she, and local teenager Zoe Warren of Maryland, led several protest gatherings outside of the Supreme Court in the days following the Dobbs decision. But D’Eredita would become disillusioned with RU4AR, simply saying “F*** Rise Up” months later.
Warren would soon be newly minted as the leader of the (though maybe not the, as it would later turn out) Washington DC chapter of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights. She spent the summer trying to spur a group of around five or six people into attention grabbing action. The group contemplated a series of histrionic “actions,” including defacing various publicly visible objects with stickers, possible banner drops on high way overpasses, and disrupting sporting events. One especially troubling suggestion was to dump green dye into the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. That morphed into painting hundreds of rubber ducks green, to be set afloat on the Reflecting Pool. That goal was ultimately abandoned, and Warren settled for staging a one person rally on her own, in front of the Supreme Court in August. Thanks to word spreading on social media, a local crowd of around 10 people showed, with one soon taking over for a stage frightened Warren, leading the ad hoc assembly in a few chants and a short march to the end of the block and back again.
Warren also parted ways with the “organization,” by summer's end. While using her departure for college as an excuse, she had been unable to live up to the pressure to generate money for the group and to bring people into the RevCom fold. What remained of her cell tried to maintain cohesion after her exist, looking forward to a chance to finally do something by participating in the the upcoming Women's March in October of that year. But they found that a team lead by Sam Goldman from the now dormant Refuse Fascism was tasked with representing the group.
Under Goldman's observation, members of RU4AR collected donations in small buckets, as if passing around collection plates at church, while selling cheap green bandanas for $15 (apparently capitalism suits them just fine at times). They also attempted to fully co-opt the optics of the Women's March, by positioning their own signage and banners in the front of the march. Organizers interceded, forcing the group to stay away from the front or to leave their banners behind.
After the midterms, with public anger over abortion now spent and attention now focused on a new crop of political questions for the new Congress to address, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights fizzled. RevCom now stands by, waiting for the next opportunity.