Bea B, New York, NY
20 RCA comrades intervened in the NYC No Kings march. This is essentially an event organized by the Democratic Party, so we were anticipating more liberal views among the crowd. We also were unsure how large or energetic the turnout would be, given that New York has not directly experienced the heightened political atmosphere created by Trump sending in ICE or National Guard troops to other cities. But we showed up to get a sense of the mood and to put forward the communist perspective of what it will take to fight Trumpism!
We prepared ourselves for this by meeting a block away beforehand for a quick political discussion based of the article “The Government Shutdown is a Bipartisan Attack on Workers—Where are the Labor Leaders?” We saw our perspective of how to launch a real fightback against Trump and all the billionaires as our best way to connect with this crowd.
All that was needed was a bit of confidence to hold a copy of The Communist high. People popped out of the crowd to say “I need one of those!”
As we expected, the turnout was mainly older liberals. But comrades did an excellent job of sorting through the crowd and making a beeline toward those we could tell had some potential. Once again, this simply required holding the paper high, shouting our slogans over the heads of some protesters who were not (yet) looking for Marxist ideas, and making our way over to anyone who gave us a nod. In total, we made 11 contacts and sold 30 papers for $151!