Revolution Brews in Radical Bookstore

Along Mass. Ave. on the way to Central Square, the crowded display window of Revolution Books lies snuggled just between the Clayroom and A Taste of Culture. Many leftist and radical faces have been featured in this window over the past two decades of the independent bookstore’s life—including Karl Marx to Mumia Abu Jamal.

While Chinese communism, the Soviet Union and the PRC (People’s Republic of Cambridge) have dimmed, collapsed and sold out, Revolution Books hasn’t. The store still proudly proclaims its mission: to provide access to a broad range of books by authors critical of the United States and global capitalism.

In 1998, a similar leftist bookstore in Central Square, the Lucy Parsons Center, was driven out of its longtime home to make room for a new block of high-end condos. But Revolution Books has remained.

The staying power of this tiny store has been remarkable, especially with Cambridge’s skyrocketing rents and the increasing gentrification of the Square.

Still, interest in the bookstore has changed drastically since the early 1980s. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Communists-in-crisis turned to the store for literature on the coming world order.

“You’ve heard all that theory about the ‘end of civilization’?” asks bookstore staff member George Bryant, pulling a book off the shelf. “People had a lot of questions about where Communism was going to go. Our party leader, Bob Avakian, put out this book.”

He displays the cover of Phony Communism is Dead… Long Live Real Communism!

“This bookstore is associated with the Maoist movement,” he says. “The end of the Soviet Union, which had been opposing Maoist principles, was a new chance.”

And, he says, there’s considerable interest in this movement—from a wide variety of people,

“We get a number of people walking, some Harvard students, a bunch of high school students, local people,” he says. “We have a bunch of regulars. It’s a place you can come to hear viewpoints which are normally kept from us.”

It’s not just the books on the shelves, either. Bryant says he and the other half-dozen volunteers who staff the store all feel strongly about U.S. economic imperialism and globalization, and often engage customers in discussions of history and current politics, throwing in recommendations for books and videos as they do.

In recent weeks, the war in Iraq sparked activity and criticism from Maoists, and prompted other, less radical Americans to look for alternate viewpoints, Bryant says.

“After the Patriot Act, people started coming in here, saying that they wanted to buy the books before the government shut us down,” he says. “The situation since September 11 has definitely changed public discourse, changed how comfortable people feel about expressing opinions.”

But apparently this discomfort doesn’t extend to George Bryant and his colleague Owen, who were just heading out to sell copies of The Revolutionary Worker newspaper.

“We aspire to a better world,” he says, asked whether any specific revolutionary credentials are required to work at the store. “We want to promote a revolutionary view to change the world.”