By Rolf Yungclas ——Bio and Archives--June 9, 2014
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“I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th [1992], and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist....I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”One of the leading groups in the Bay area promoting violent revolution through civil unrest has been the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist-Stalininst group led by Bob Avakian, who has delusions of himself being a modern day Vladimir Lenin, and the U.S. as his future Soviet Union. “When a Ventura County jury delivered its not guilty verdicts in the trial of the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King, [Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) national spokesman Carl] Dix was at work on his speech for the party's annual May Day demonstration--an event with a history of unraveling into bloody clashes with the Los Angeles Police Department. “Dix immediately drafted a statement in support of ‘the rebellion’ that members later distributed through the riot zone and at local high schools. As he wrote, other members of the group rallied at Parker Center, where television viewers watched a multiracial crowd taunt the police and topple and torch a kiosk. From there, RCP members branched out, spray-painting their slogans on walls from South-Central to Chinatown. " ‘We tried to see to it that as much got up as could be done,’ Dix said during a June interview at a downtown restaurant.” In an article written July 24, 2013, by Rachel Swan, we see the Revolutionary Communist Party’s role in inciting and/or co-opting community protests during the Trayvon Martin protests:
“As protesters marched through the city's downtown corridor waving Martin's picture and a slew of catchy slogans — ‘Justice 4 Travon’; ‘We Are All Trayvon Martin’; ‘If You Ain't Mad You're Racist’ — a small group of organizers sat in an assembly line at Frank Ogawa Plaza, churning out the raw materials. One girl held a stencil and ink, another wrapped tape around the signs. Small, unseen hands were creating the media to convey the message, often adding other subtle messages of their own. Some signs bore another imprimatur, less recognizable than Martin's, but equally potent: the Revolutionary Communist Party. “ ‘You see?’ asked a slack-jawed passerby, swatting a hand toward the crowd of Trayvon protesters who had gathered at 14th and Broadway on Sunday afternoon. ‘This is actually a Communist rally.’ “Whether or not that's true depends on how much credit you give the organizers. Members of the Berkeley-based Revolutionary Communist Party had, indeed, set the time and date for two consecutive Trayvon Martin rallies in Oakland, as well as the ones in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.” “It turns out that Revolutionary Communists have coordinated — or perhaps infiltrated — Trayvon Martin protests throughout the country, often with more aggressive sloganeering than in Oakland. In Florida, they didn't shy away from connecting Martin to larger, more abstract causes, such as US imperialism and the war in Afghanistan.”While Van Jones doesn’t claim any affiliation with the Revolutionary Communist party or any other revolutionary Marxist organizations, he gives no indication that he has turned from his revolutionary ways and association with them.
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Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years