Bob Avakian
Robert Bruce "Bob" Avakian is the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist group in the United States.
Avakian was originally from Berkeley, California, and was a noted basketball player for his high school. His father was Spurgeon Avakian (1913-2002), an Alameda County judge in Oakland, California, and member of the Berkeley School Board. Bob went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he became very involved in radical politics. He participated in the Free Speech Movement alongside Mario Savio. His political activities continued and he became spokesman for the Peace & Freedom Party, and an active supporter of the Black Panthers.
Bob Avakian was active in Students for a Democratic Society and was a leading figure in the Revolutionary Youth Movement II. In the Bay Area he worked to form the Bay Area Revolutionary Union. BARU expanded nationally by absorbing other Marxist-Leninist collectives coming out of the SDS. It became the Revolutionary Union.
Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Union, along with others such as C. Clark Kissinger and Carl Dix, led the formation of the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1976. When Deng Xiaoping went to the United States to visit Jimmy Carter, the RCP led protests at the White House and other sites throughout Washington, D.C. As a result of these demonstrations, Avakian was threatened with a 241 year prison sentence, and went into exile. He still writes for the newspaper of his party, Revolutionary Worker, and has written several books including:
- Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones
- Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That?
- Could We Really Win?
- Phony Communism is Dead; Long Live Real Communism
- The Immortal Contributions of Mao Tse-Tung
- Bullets From the Writings Speeches and Interviews of Bob Avakian (Little Silver Book)
- For a Harvest of Dragons
He released an audio recording in 2001 entitled "Bob Avakian Speaks Out", which is available in two segments. [1]
He also released a film "Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, and What It's All About", which records a speech he gave in 2003.
He has been a leading theorist of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.