To Those Who Hate the Oppression of Women—And Want to See Humanity Free of Every Chain...
Do Not Miss BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
A message from Sunsara Taylor
March 8, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Karl Marx once wrote that in the future communist society it will be as difficult to imagine owning a piece of land as it is today to picture owning a human being.
The same principle applies to the rest of the many horrors today seem to constitute the "natural order of things." It will be difficult for people to fathom how it ever seemed acceptable to live in a world where millions of children died each year from preventable disease, where technology and innovation were utilized not to solve world hunger but to create and unleash arsenals of mass destruction, or where ideas—even new understandings of how to cure epidemic diseases—were considered "private property" and held back unless someone could profit off them.
As one critical dimension of this, human beings will look back in bewildered horror at the idea that it was ever considered "human nature" for men to dominate, degrade, and brutalize women. Students will roll their eyes in disbelief as teachers try to convince them that people had ever declared this era in particular—one marked by a global epidemic of rape, increasingly violent pornography, and a sex-slave trade that consumes women and girls by the millions, from the one end, and the rise of fundamentalisms with its spectacular misogynist violence, its shaming of women, and its all-out assault on abortion and birth control, on the other—as a time of "great advance for women." And girls everywhere will grow up free from ever knowing what it is to feel shame over their sexuality, to be reduced to objects of any kind, or to fear for their safety at the hands of men.
If this, today, is hard to imagine—that is not surprising. Everything about the world we live in reinforces the notion that this is "the way things have always been" and "how they will always stay."
All of this is blown away when you hear BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
This masterpiece six and a half hour speech spans the globe and comprehends the many outrages which call forth both the need and the basis for genuine communist revolution. Woven through this, BA reveals—with unrelenting passion and sweeping substance—both the source and the real-world and realizable solution to the oppression of women. He shows the connections between this and all other forms of oppression and the roots of—and reinforcement between—all of this in class divisions. He shows very concretely HOW a total revolution could be won to sweep all this away. And he shows how no such revolution could actually succeed if it does not deal with the liberation of women as one extremely important component from beginning to end.
BA addresses head-on the way this system has deprived so many of even the ability to see beyond these current conditions of female enslavement and degradation—and he takes a sledge hammer to any sense of this being necessarily "permanent" or the result of some supposedly unchangeable "human nature."
He enables you to see, and to feel towards, the way we are forced to live—including the cruel and misogynist dimensions of the culture that go unnoticed even by most who consider themselves "enlightened"—something as close to the horrified bewilderment of those future generations as it is possible to feel today.
He can do this because he understands—and brings alive in vivid dimensions—how it is actually possible to win the fight to bring into being a whole new liberated era for human beings.
All this is why you need to be at the premiere of BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
Such a revolution won't be easy, and this is something that BA doesn't shine on or shy away from. But such a revolution is possible, and this is something that BA not only reveals but gives others the method to understand and contribute to.
No one else on the planet today is even dealing with the magnitude of questions BA takes on in this talk, let alone providing answers.
There is nothing more important that any of us could be engaging than what is presented in BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
And BA is infectious in his moral commitment—unflagging, in fact intensifying, over nearly five decades—to contribute all of his heart, and all his knowledge, skills and abilities to serving the cause of revolution and the emancipation of humanity. It is an example we can all learn from and a standard we should all aspire to.
All this is why you should not only clear your day to attend, but work to bring others to, BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
For those of you with a special commitment to the liberation of women, stop and really think about what first drove you to take up this fight. Maybe it was the murder of abortion doctors. Maybe you and/or countless friends were raped or molested. No doubt you are sickened by the way girls in some parts of the world are shrouded and shamed while others are taught to move and act like sex objects long before they even know what sex is. Surely you are horrified by the millions and millions of women and girls who are beaten and pimped and traded as sex slaves. You and I both know that I could continue this list for pages and pages and still not exhaust all the possible outrages that might have been the first to push you to fight.
I know that many of you expand your thinking to include the children forced to work in the mines of India and Africa, the millions locked the concrete dungeons of the U.S. prison system, the irreversible destruction of the earth's ecosystems that escalates every day, and the countless other degradations and horrors of this world.
Now think about the possibility of all of this ending.
If you are serious about wanting that—not just fighting the "good fight" or helping a few people, but really and truly seeing all of this END—then there really is nothing more important you can do on March 16/17 than to clear your day, get your ticket, bring your friends, and listen and engage very deeply with BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
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