Declaration of Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia, May 1, 2016:

Urgently needed: Take up the new synthesis of communism of Bob Avakian, the new framework required for a new stage of revolution!

May 2, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The world as such is intolerable, it is suffocating.

It is a world in which the capacity to feed all human beings coexists disgracefully with more than a billion people who “live” with chronic malnutrition, and literally every five seconds a person dies of hunger!...

It is a world in which they justify wars of aggression in country after country, torture and massacres, with a morality that values the lives of people in Western countries (and of white people, men, the rich) over the lives of everyone else...

It is a world in which millions of people are forced to risk their lives, driven from their homes by reactionary wars and plunder and other problems caused by the system that rules over them...

It is a world in which the oppressed are rounded up wherever they go, running the risk of an early death, a life foreclosed and ruined, insulted at every turn and even murdered, simply due to who they are...

It is a world where everything (including people, especially women and children) becomes an object to be bought and sold...

It is a world where women face a daily onslaught of harassment, discrimination, oppression and hidden or open and even physical and lethal brutal aggression...

It is a world of outrageous political and legal attacks and vicious intimidation against LGBT people...

It is a world in which, due to the environmental emergency, the future of life on this planet is uncertain...

It is a world ruled by a system that snuffs out spirits, and degrades the people stripping them of their status of full human beings...

And although material resources, knowledge and people exist that could make another way of life possible for all of humanity, they are fettered and then used to suck people into more ignorance, superstition and misery.

Yes, it is true that exploitation and oppression breed resistance. Around the world again and again signs of discontent and outbreaks of fury burst forth. It is commonplace that a deep sentiment arises that there should be a better way to organize human society, that another, different world must be and is possible. But without a scientific approach, method and leadership, in general that sentiment is channeled into dead ends, and the masses continue to be subjected to endless horrors.

Today’s world is a horror, not because of human nature but the functioning of the system. There is no permanent necessity for the state of affairs that exists. The world does not have to be this way. There is a way out, communist revolution.

Those who want to create this completely different world immediately confront two things. On the one hand, the repressive forces of the power structure that are used against any challenge to its authority and, on the other hand, there is also contestation in the realm of ideas.

Let us do both: fight the power structure; and debate and wrangle with the most advanced, radical and revolutionary ideas of these times. All in the midst of developing a new revolutionary movement and upsurge, that go further than even the best of the past.

There is debate in society over whether another world is really possible or not, and over what kind of world we want: Is there a way to actually change how people have to live? Instead of changing the various ways in which people suffer oppression, what would it take to eliminate oppression concretely and completely?

In general, there are struggles in the realms of morality, science, religion and worldview; over the question of compromise or resistance; on how to understand and evaluate the first stage of communist revolutions and on many other fronts.

But the most important struggle in the realm of ideas today focuses on the kind of change we need, the theory that can guide this change and the leadership to bring about this radical transformation. There is no other way around it: a revolution, a communist revolution, is still needed.

A real revolution is the only way to end the source of the problem, end the capitalist-imperialist system that dominates the world. The imperialist powers like the United States, the European powers, Russia and China are at the top of this system and dominate countries like Colombia. Of course the capitalist-imperialist system is not all-powerful. There are crises and cracks in the walls of this system. And therein lies the material basis for possibilities of making revolution.

The world capitalist system is no mystery, it can be known and understood. Karl Marx, 150 years ago, laid the foundations for a new science and revealed the secrets of the system’s functioning and how to overthrow it through a new kind of revolution, the communist revolution. Since then, the communists along with millions of proletarians and other oppressed masses throughout the world have tried to continue on this revolutionary path and have changed the history of humanity forever, although they suffered bitter defeats.

The Paris Commune was a first attempt, drowned in blood by the repressive forces of the system after two months. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, synthesized this short but valuable experience and conceived the kind of state needed for the communist revolution: the dictatorship of the proletariat.

On the basis of Marx’s theory and approach, revolutionary efforts to transform the world began. In the twentieth century there were two great socialist revolutions with great achievements and experiences for humanity, first in the Russian Revolution of 1917 under the leadership of Lenin and later the Chinese Revolution in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Tsetung.

With their theoretical developments and advances in the science of Marxism, Lenin and Mao were able to lead the class struggle, amid tremendous difficulties, to victory in order to immediately take to new heights the difficult process of uprooting the old and building a new economic base and political and cultural superstructure for the new society. They undertook what Marx called the great ruptures with traditional property relations and with the traditional ideas produced and conditioned by them.

However, the Soviet Revolution in Russia was defeated in the mid-1950s and the Chinese Revolution was defeated in late 1976. In both cases a new bourgeoisie that emerged within the party and the socialist state seized power and undertook the restoration of capitalism, although they continued to use the label “socialist.”

In grappling with how to understand the reasons for and preventing the restoration of capitalism, Mao developed the science of Marxism, and to that end he proposed and led a “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution was not able to prevent restoration, and after a coup d’état, the “capitalist roaders” seized power and helped imperialism turn China into the “sweatshop” of the world. This brought to an end the first stage of communist revolutions in the history of humanity.

A wave of counterrevolution broke out. And among the oppressed masses, reactionary political movements took hold in many places. But important revolutionary wars led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties also made significant advances that inspired revolutionaries and masses of people worldwide. However, those heroic struggles came up against the reality of the great changes in the world and the limitations and distortions of the theory. And the science of communism demanded a new leap even more. A new framework was needed to lay the basis for a truly new stage of communist revolution.

The communist movement faced a real crossroads. With the false verdicts of the reactionaries and the reformists, the liberating history and experience of communism were being discarded in the revolutionary movement, among the bulk of the previously-progressive intelligentsia and among the masses in general, taking up the tattered flags of bourgeois democracy instead. On the other hand a smaller section clung dogmatically and religiously to the revolutionary experience and theory of the first stage of the revolution, including its errors and limitations.

It should be said that many of the prevailing errors in the international communist movement do not come from Marx, Lenin and Mao, who struggled against many of them. However, elements of these incorrect tendencies existed in their own thinking that were then taken up by one or another section of the communist movement and developed into fully developed lines.

But besides the dead ends of the dogmatic trend and the bourgeois-democratic trend (both increasingly becoming residues of the past), there were those who fought to stay on course and clear the revolutionary way forward. The theoretical and practical developments of the communist movement have been rescued and enriched in vision and clarity by another leap in the science of communism. A new leap whereby it is possible to understand much better than before the functioning of the current system and how to free ourselves from it.

This great breakthrough has not been easy. It has taken decades of painstaking scientific work of analysis of the many aspects of the experience of the first stage of revolution, synthesizing its lessons. It has made it possible to recognize and criticize many errors (although the accomplishments were principal) of this first stage of revolution. Ruptures have been recognized and made with various misconceptions in the body of the science of communism developed by Marx, Lenin and Mao, and all the correct parts in this body (which are principal) have been synthesized and reconfigured at new heights.

This new leap in the science of communism has been the product of the theoretical work and the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and the greatest revolutionary of our time. Avakian has not just stayed the course but has produced a whole body of work with a new synthesis of communism: a new level of freedom with which we can interact with the necessity that we now face and transform it in a revolutionary way. Facing up to the necessity—that is, reality and what we are up against—is the basis for achieving freedom—that is, the capacity to transform that reality (based on understanding it).

Facing reality, as it really is, sounds easy but it is not. It is neither automatic nor “natural,” and therefore requires scientific approach and method. The scientific approach and method of communism has been rescued, given a new foundation and enriched by Bob Avakian, who has identified and engaged the thorniest problems facing revolutionaries. In this process, he has revolutionized communism even more, not only by identifying and breaking with aspects of it that were not scientific but by putting all of communism on a more scientific basis.

Therefore, the essence of the new synthesis is the further development and synthesis of communism as scientific method and approach, and the more systematic application of this scientific method and approach to reality in general and in particular to the revolutionary struggle to overthrow and uproot all systems and relations of exploitation and oppression and advance to a communist world.

As with all advances in all science, these do not easily break new ground. Within the Grupo Comunista Revolucionario itself, a serious struggle has been necessary to understand it, take it up and get bearings with it in order to advance the revolution in Colombia as part of the world revolution, which requires above all building the party required to lead it.

And a central focus of today’s genuine communist revolutionaries, in the midst of the actual process of building the genuine communist party, is working to root the new synthesis of communism developed by Bob Avakian in the revolutionary movement, and among the masses of people as part of building a movement for revolution under the leadership of such a party. All those who really are concerned about the situation in the world and yearn for real change must engage and fight for this new synthesis.

Humanity needs revolution and the new synthesis of communism of Bob Avakian!

Revolution, nothing less!

 

 

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