By Gaston F. Ceron

For Joan Hirsch, running Revolution Books is more than just a job, it's a political act.

"The point of the store is to change the world," said Hirsch, who joined its staff in the 1980s and has managed it for most of the years since.

The Manhattan store is one of a relatively small network of bookshops still dedicated to spreading word of the communist cause in this country. Its mission statement hangs next to the cashier, near posters denouncing the threat of war in Iraq and police brutality: "We promote the literature of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, the revolutionary internationalist movement."

Located on West 19th Street near Fifth Avenue, the store's thousands of books include works by and about the pre-eminent communist thinkers Marx, Lenin and Mao, as well as on subjects as varied as gay and lesbian politics and Latin America.

On a recent afternoon, fewer than 10 customers were browsing through the titles. Reggae music played in the background. A stack of Revolutionary Worker newspapers sat by the checkout counter. Hirsch is quick to ask shoppers whether they would like to purchase one of the papers for $1. She has a penchant for engaging store customers on a range of weighty subjects, with the U.S. assault on Iraq at the top of her current list.

An upside-down map of the world hangs on a wall. "What's cool about it is that it challenges people's preconceived notions about relationships between countries," Hirsch said.

The network of communist bookstores that counts New York's Revolution Books as a link is composed of independently owned bookshops. They share a singular philosophy. "We all carry related literature," said Reiko Redmonde, events coordinator at the Revolution Books in Berkeley, Calif. "People experience inequalities and injustices in this country or they observe it. And people say, 'Why is this?' Our stores speak to this."

Dozens of people typically stop by the New York store on a typical day, Hirsch said. Bertell Olllman, a political-science professor at New York University, is among them. He enjoys the store's selection of left-wing magazines and the discourse that sometimes break out.

"I go there at least once or twice a year," Ollman said. "I find it to be quite a good radical bookstore."

Paul Rodriguez is one of about a dozen people who help Revolution Books stay afloat. Nearly all are volunteers. "We pay me a little bit," Hirsch said, "but I have another job." Hirsch, who works part-time as an assistant in a lawyer's office, is grateful for Rodriguez and others who donate their time to the store.

A 64-year-old unemployed cook from Spanish Harlem, Rodriguez is critical of capitalism and the economic toll he says it takes on people's lives, especially in a city such as New York where the cost of living is so high. His volunteering at the bookstore is one expression of his political activism. "I don't go to marches," Rodriguez said as he took a break from sorting books and answering the telephone at the store. "When push comes to shove, am I going to get a gun and go be a Black Panther? I don't know."

Before moving to its current location, Revolution Books was based next to Union Square. Despite the high cost of renting in Manhattan, Hirsch said the store has been able to hang on, helped by its regulars. It receives "a lot of walk-in business" and draws students purchasing textbooks, which also are available at Revolution Books.

"We make enough money to stay in business," Hirsch said, declining to be more specific.

Hirsch, 54, traces her political consciousness to the 1960s, the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Born in Chicago but reared in Los Angeles, Hirsch was studying at San Francisco State University when she dropped out. "I never went back," she said. "I had to stop the war."

From those days of protesting war in Southeast Asia, Hirsch's political views continued to take shape. In 1984, she moved to New York and joined Revolution Books, which she said was founded in 1979 by communist supporters. Over the years, Hirsch has taken up various other causes, including that of Pennsylvania death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. These days, Iraq occupies much of her energies.

She is, by her own measure, as nonconformist as a good communist living in a capitalist land should be. "I'm very proud to say I never voted," Hirsch said. "Walking into a voting booth is like signing a loyalty oath to the system."

Despite the efforts of Hirsch and her colleagues, communism remains far from the mainstream of political discourse in the United States. In this era, people sometimes even seem unaware that communists still exist, to the extent that a communist character was once featured as an oddity in an episode of "Seinfeld."

This doesn't discourage Hirsch, who points out that the history of communism and socialism is very short. "We're certainly not at the end of history," she said.

Reprinted at Political Forum with permission.

Wow. I know, we must be so screwed up. That this kook can support himself, stay in business in manhattan, and doesn't have to do anything really "productie" in the classical sense...gets to run a book store, essentially making a living fomenting his ideas, in some of the priciest real estate in the world...yet he thinks he is getting a raw deal. Think he would have that same "dissident job opportunity" in Soviet Russia? Nyet!

I think it's great that nobody has burst her bubble and told her communism died and was buried. Places like this are almost like having living museums around. I bet it makes the young republicans a little uneasy all the same.

I really like the phrase "pre-eminent communist thinkers", which is the social analogue of saying the brilliant engineers that designed the Hindenburgh...

The bottom line is that comrade Joan works in a law office and has managed a book store succesfully for nearly 25yrs, which aside from being a lot of work, sounds considerably more mainstream than I suspect she would like it to.

oc

How can an idea or a theory be dead and buried? Communsim isn't over as an idea simply because parties and regimes using that name collapsed.

We don't say capitalism is dead every time a small countries economy goes belly up, and believe me, there are more examples of countries where capialism has failed the people than communism.

The Communist bloc is dead and buried. The Coomunist parties of Eastern Europe are dead and buried, but the idea and theories are of course still very much alive and relevant.

I am not a communist but it is only in the USA that such a bookshop would be considered odd or obsolete.

If it were dead, there would not be a communist revolutions in Nepal, and Colombia.

__________________
'Over 50 percent of our energy comes from overseas. Fortunately, a lot of it comes from Canada' - Dubya

I suppose you want us to believe they spontaneously appeared too.

__________________
"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left."
Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

What the heck is it about Communism that so many people like? I mean its one of the stupidest political idea's off all time imo. I just don't understand why anyone at all would actually care or desire this crap. Dose the idea of communism still exsist? Of course the idea is still out there so is Nazism and Fascist and Monarchism. But do these ideals have any real affect on the world? Hardly the "extremes" are now a days only scene (for the most part) in third world countries and in more economically powerful counties like the US these ideals are considered idiotic at best. Even the most liberal people I know ( even one self proclaimed Socialist) things communism s one of the stupidest ideas of all time.

__________________
Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left. - F.A. Hayek

Where have all the Conservatives Gone?

There is always hope, as long as one can think.

We'll see how long they last.

in the world. Which is why a system that is inherently flawed like communism will be embraced in the world for a long time. People will always be drawn to things that look good but never work.