Revolution Books 40th Anniversary Celebration

Join Sahar Delijani, Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, Julia Scheeres and Andy Zee to Celebrate Revolution Books 40th Anniversary.

6pm Reception with wine and light refreshments
7pm Program & champagne toast

This is a celebration – as well as a renewed and urgent call for people to support the bookstore. Right as now we face a moment of stark contrast between our hopes and dreams for a better world and the stark reality that great catastrophe looms as fascist regimes rise, and as we confront environmental disaster–Revolution Books embodies the potential bright future for humanity.

You feel this when you first walk through the door and find the literature, poetry, history, science, art, and the revolutionary theory for a radically different world. You experience programs and engagements with us and with each other that percolate with emancipatory possibility.

Revolution Books is alive with the scientific understanding that a different and better world is possible. RB is the political, intellectual, and cultural center of a movement for an actual revolution and that is why it is a unique, incredible bookstore—a resource for the world. The heart of the store is the framework for unleashing the revolutionary potential of humanity: the breakthrough in scientifically knowing and radically changing the world through revolution, the new communism developed by Bob Avakian. Avakian emerged from the 60s in Berkeley, and is a leader who never gave up asking the hard questions of the road forward to human emancipation and developing the path to that future.

The store still concentrates and captures what was best in Berkeley in the 60s—the wildness and fury and intellectual, cultural and scientific daring and rebellion of the times. At RB we seek to foster a culture of revolt against a revolting culture while nurturing art that imagines in the present what a future world and people could be. And at RB people experience and can take up the science of revolution in the extensive body of work of Bob Avakian that shatters demoralized defeatist preconceptions that the misery and spirit crushing world today is all that could be.

There is a reason the fascists who come to Berkeley have focused on Revolution Books and attacked it again and again. It has to do with how they hate the Enlightenment—hate critical thinking, search for the truth; and how they see that revolutionary communism is fundamentally opposed to everything they are about.

There is all this and much more to celebrate about Revolution Books—both parts of its name. Join with the staff of Revolution Books and its broader community to make this anniversary, and the future of this unique place all it needs to be. Keep Revolution Books the vibrant, daring intellectual center for an actual revolution it must be now more than ever.