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ABOUT RAYMOND LOTTA | RESOURCES | SOCIALIST EXPERIENCE | COMMUNISM'S FUTURE
Set the Record Straight co-sponsored “REDISCOVERING CHINA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION: Art and Politics, Lived Experience, Legacies of Liberation” — A Weekend Symposium at Revolution Books and New York University, December 12-14, 2008. Read the report from this groundbreaking symposium, and comments from a young observer on a weekend of discovery.
NEW! Monthly Review’s website published Set the Record Straight’s interview with Dongping Han, author of The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village
Visit “Art and China’s Revolution” exhibit at the Asia Society, New York City, through January 11, 2009. Read an Unofficial Guide to the Exhibit!
Set the Record Straight seeks to challenge the paralyzing conventional wisdom about communism
that has seeped so deeply into popular understanding and to raise people’s sights to a far better future for humanity.
Read our mission statement...
Important Speech by Raymond Lotta:
Set the Record Straight is sponsoring Raymond Lotta, a Maoist political economist,
on a speaking tour under the title “Socialism Is Much Better than Capitalism, and Communism Will Be a Far Better World.”
Since 2005 the tour has traveled to Stanford, Columbia, UCLA, and other universities, and to London and Mexico, sparking
interest and debate among hundreds of students and professors.
Lotta’s speech challenges the reigning consensus about communism. He puts before people the actual historical record of the
“first wave” of socialist revolutions, in the Soviet Union (1917-56) and China (1949-76). He rescues from distortion, and
plain suppression of facts, what these revolutions were setting out to do and what they accomplished. These experiences of
the past are very much connected to the possibilities of the future.
Lotta also talks about the communist vision of classless society: why this vision of overcoming all relations of exploitation, oppression, and domination speaks to the highest aspirations of the great majority of humanity; and how this vision of classless society corresponds to the material and social possibilities that exist in today’s world to overcome scarcity and to organize society on the basis of social cooperation. He also addresses the shortcomings and mistakes of this “first wave” of socialist revolution, and engages real concerns and questions people have: what about Stalin, what about the treatment of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, does socialism stifle the individual?
In all of this, Raymond Lotta brings forward a new synthesis by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the
Revolutionary Communist Party. Avakian has been creatively reenvisioning the communist project — developing a deepgoing
summation of the experience of socialist revolution and a vision of a vibrant socialism, that is, a society people would
want to live in and a society that is in transition to communism.
We want to take this tour to many more places, with several events already slated for this spring.
Funds are needed for publicity and travel expenses, and to produce DVD recordings of this and other speeches and
Q&A sessions. Contributions to Set the Record Straight, a project of the International Humanities Center, are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Checks should be made payable to IHCenter/SRS.
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