From the Editors—About This Issue:

In This World of Madness...
Bring Forward Another Way!

February 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Everywhere you look around the world, two forces contend. Neither has an answer—any real, any emancipatory, answer, that is—for the agonizing, killing problems confronting humanity. Yet all too often these are posed as the only alternatives.

On one side stand the arrogant imperialists who control the world. These imperialists, with the U.S. at their head, use overwhelming military power to terrorize people into submitting to this control. They celebrate their terror and their massacres with Nazi-like culture, in films like American Sniper, the big new hit. They unleash suffocating surveillance, with new outrages coming to light all the time, and they persecute those who expose their illegal spying. They debate and even battle (sometimes quite sharply) with each other over whether, and how, and where, and exactly when to unleash war and aggression, and they quarrel over how to package it... but the ultimate aim is the same: exploitation and domination of the people and the planet. In their “home countries,” savage inequalities rage. They brutally repress “minorities”—as the U.S. does to Black people and Latinos, where cops murder 12-year-olds playing in the park and the criminal injustice system entraps millions of people in its snares. They brag of the status of women, while they “roll back” and suppress abortion rights and birth control and pour forth a putrid pornographic culture that “eroticizes” domination, enslavement, and brutality. And all the while, they hurtle the planet to ecological devastation and disaster.

And what is the other pole? Far too often the only opposition people see is in the form of reactionary religious, woman-hating and woman-killing fanaticism, from Nigeria to Pakistan to Syria and Iraq and beyond. Despite its claims to be an alternative, fanatical Islam is deeply rooted in the very same horizons of exploitation and domination as those they claim to oppose. As Bob Avakian has put it:

What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these “outmodeds,” you end up strengthening both.

While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these “historically outmodeds” has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system, and in particular the U.S. imperialists.

BAsics 1:28

This is madness! And the fact that these are the only alternatives that most people know about right now is itself horrific, suffocating, and intolerable. Truly the people and the planet need another way. And that other way is being forged and fought for and brought forward, right now, in the movement for revolution. The truth of that, the possibility of a truly liberating way human society could be, was powerfully posed in the Dialogue this past November between Bob Avakian and Cornel West—“Revolution and Religion: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion.”—and this is brought out in the wonderful new piece we are featuring, “Ardea Skybreak, on Attending the Dialogue Between Bob Avakian and Cornel West.” At the same time, people in the U.S. are working to retake the offensive against police murder and the whole genocidal program it spearheads. This is a movement of crucial importance both in its own right and to the cause of revolution—and we cover that as well in this issue, beginning with the important conference held February 7 and 8 in Atlanta by the Stop Mass Incarceration Network.

Check out what’s going on in the world on this website. Learn about the causes of these different events, what ties them together, and learn as well about Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism and how that world can be fundamentally changed. Learn how we can hasten, and are hastening, the day when revolution becomes possible—and be part of getting ready for that (see "What Is a Revolutionary Situation?", an excerpt from what Bob Avakian had planned to include in his Opening Presentation to the Dialogue on November15, 2014, with Cornel West). Get organized for an actual revolution.

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