Two letters:

“[T]his [International Women’s Day] is a day that we stand up all over the world... I support the Revolution Tour because it is putting revolution on the map...”

February 22, 2021 | revcom.us

 

We are two friends who share a deep personal connection to struggles in oppressed countries outside the US. In the past we have hosted international dinners to raise money for the National Revolution Tour, but because of the pandemic, we are only able to donate $200, so had the idea of contributing a rather extensive letter to revcom.us in honor of International Women’s Day 2021.

We have each written a few words about why it is so important to us to spread the New Communism, coming from our personal histories.

 

Letter 1:

When I was about 15, 16 years old there was an uprising of women in the North of Iran. It stayed in the back of my mind ever since then, wondering why things have to be this way.

As I was growing up, I always thought, why are some people so poor and others have too much. My neighbors, the man worked for the government but still he didn’t make enough to feed his 5 or 6 children. Sometimes they didn’t have enough to eat. Later on, I got married and came to the US and then I was taking care of my family and working, but this was always in the back of my mind.

After the revolution in 1979 [that overthrew the Shah imposed by the US], many people who were students in the US went back to Iran, they thought maybe the country has changed. We went back to Iran, but we could see the situation was very bad. One of our relatives had been killed by the Shah’s secret police, then another was killed by Khomeini’s.

The new people, the young people, they hate the way it is, they hate the fundamentalists. But they think, “nothing’s going to happen”. Even those people who were active before the revolution of 1979 in Iran, they have lost hope. The Islamic fundamentalist revolution happened 40 years ago. The Shah killed many people, and the Islamic Republic killed even more. Now, women have no rights at all. On Facebook, an Iranian woman said, why should we celebrate International Women’s Day when women have no rights? What’s to celebrate? We are nothing but maids to our husbands. But this is a day that we stand up all over the world, to say women are not nothing, we will be more than that.

I support the Revolution Tour because it is putting revolution on the map. It is letting people know what is the problem and what is the solution, as BA said.

There is not much I can do. But I want to support those who are on the front lines. I love to see those young people fighting for revolution, for Bob Avakian’s leadership. Trump is out but the fascists are still in the government. And as long as we have capitalism, we will have oppression and imperialism. So, we need revolution, we need Bob Avakian.

 

Letter 2:

Since I was young, I have closely followed the revolutionary movements and the staggering oppression of people in Central America and Mexico, especially indigenous people and peasants. But it is heartbreaking to see how, in spite of enormous sacrifice—in particular the deaths of 300,000+ people just in the small countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua in civil wars and massacres around the 1980s—the masses of people are not only as bitterly impoverished as before, not only robbed, raped and killed with impunity by the official powers that be, but are now also set upon by gangs and cartels, which may include their own neighbors and relatives. Mexico, too, after the abandonment or defeat of armed struggle by various leftist groups, has been turned into a swamp of clandestine mass graves, with at least 61,000 disappeared and 300,000 dead since the start of the spurious “war on drugs”, and where huge numbers of youth have become disposable cannon fodder for the cartels, killing each other and other equally oppressed people to fatten the US drug trade.

During the struggles of the mid 70s and 80s in these countries, people bravely faced horrific levels of death and repression because they had hope of winning a better future out of it all. That hope was to a certain extent based on a false path to revolution, but also on a real surge of national liberation struggles worldwide.

These are the heartbreaking “harvests” of failed and betrayed revolutions, on top of the normal functioning of the capitalist-imperialist system that forces people on the bottom of society to fight over scraps. These are lands and peoples who are suffocating from lack of hope, starved of the new communism that Bob Avakian has developed since the fall of the socialist revolutions of the last century. The economic, political and environmental crisis which has fed a vast flood of refugees, in particular from the Northern Triangle of Central America, also contains within itself the seeds for a whole new world without borders, in which the creativity and effort of every human being is needed and nurtured: a dialectical materialist analysis shows us this is possible.

It is also very significant and heartening to see some renewed upsurge in Latin America, such as in Chile, with an especially important component of struggle throughout the continent being an outpouring of beautiful mass rebellion of women against femicide and rape, and for abortion rights. I was bowled over to see women fill the Zócalo plaza in Mexico—the fourth most dangerous country in the world for women in 2021 (Iran is fifth)—dancing and singing “Un violador en tu camino (A rapist in your path)”: a powerful group routine created in Chile as a response to sexual violence by police against activist women in the wave of protests which rocked Chile in 2019; the lyrics are a bitter play on the Chilean police propaganda piece, “A policeman in your path”.

In and of themselves, these actions by women are a welcome breath of fresh air and raise earthshaking questions about what is the source of these terrible chains on half of humanity and how to tear them off completely.

But what will be the answer to those questions, and can these new upsurges lead to actually breaking all the chains or will they fall back into supporting one reform or another, like a female president or individual “empowerment” or revenge? The answer depends so much on whether the force for real revolution can become an organized, concrete force in the world, and that depends so much on what we do.

Thinking back to the defeats in many armed struggles in Latin America and the new shoots of resistance, I was struck by this part of Avakian’s 2021 New Year’s statement (which I’ve bolded):

To understand why we are confronted with the situation we are, it is necessary not merely to respond to—and in effect be whipped around by—what is happening on the surface at any given time, but to dig beneath the surface, to discover the underlying mainsprings and causes of things, and arrive at an understanding of the fundamental problem and the actual solution…. working to grasp the deeper relations and dynamics of this system and how this is setting the framework for how different sections of society spontaneously think and react to events in society and the world, and what is the possible way forward to transforming all of this in the interests of the masses of humanity and ultimately humanity as a whole.

Certainly, it requires struggle and transformation to take up this thoroughly scientific outlook which is a further development, and in some ways a leap beyond, the Marxist movement of the last century—but right now, the vast majority of people in other countries have simply never even heard that it exists.

This brings me back to why revcom.us plays such a crucial role on an international stage, in tandem with the National Revolution Tour, the Revolution Clubs and The RNL Show. Here’s a real-world example: The Revolution Tour and Clubs burn the US rag at the White House (2019); the flames grace the front page of a major newspaper in Spain syndicated throughout Latin America; Spanish-speaking people (including those in the US) say, “In the US? ¡Cabrón! Who are those people that did that?!”, link to revcom.us, and find a treasure trove of key works of Bob Avakian in Spanish. This can lead to their struggling in these other countries over reform/revisionism vs revolution and to the organization of forces for a real, all the way revolution… which in turn strengthens the revolutionary communist trend in still other countries and reflects back onto the US itself.

Overthrowing imperialism right within the belly of the beast, the biggest superpower, is the paramount responsibility of those who live in it, but it is an integral part of the revolution on a world scale, because this world really is tightly woven together. We have seen that in a negative way with the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. But in another, profound sense, it is a great strength for the revolution that there are strong ties between immigrants and their families in their home countries. An advance in revolutionary organization in one part of the world can have huge impacts in other parts.