“Society is being ripped apart...”
We are “two countries sharing the same border...”

Why This Is
A RARE TIME WHEN
REVOLUTION BECOMES POSSIBLE

August 9, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Welcome to Revolution Books, New York; And, welcome to all the viewers watching the The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on August 5, 2021 ...

This is The RNL Show’s 64th Episode and the first in front of a live audience here at Revolution Books. My name is Andy Zee, and I am the host of The RNL Show.

There are dreams that startle you awake... nightmares that leave you with a dread of the night... and a haunting of the day. There are other dreams too—beautiful in technicolor... where you feel fully alive with joy and purpose... dreams that motivate with aspirations of freedom from all that oppresses and represses—a living not downpressed by the life sucking machine of this system that destroys people and thwarts being fully human.

A little over a year ago, we saw in the streets of this country and around the world millions of young people—born in this, the 21st century—youth resplendent in their diversity of race, nationality, and gender taking to the streets struggling for a dream of a world at last rid of racial oppression with its concentrated expression in the murder of Black and Brown people by police just for being who they are.

There are dreams from the 1960s that still resonate with potential to be ignited again—hopes and dreams, and yes, there were some schemes, for a world rejecting the white, Mad Men, Jim Crow, apartheid, patriarchal, anti-gay, oppressive, murderous, stultifying U.S. society—a fierce and liberating desire, a new culture and ferocious struggle for a world of equality and liberation, a world... yes, of peace, love, and understanding. Revolution was in the air. A time when there were revolutionary societies and revolutionary struggles, revolutions that were ultimately turned back. Seeds were planted.

There are dreams that a people brought from Africa in chains and their descendants have endured for 402 years to be free from murderous bondage... free from the life-stealing legacy of slavery that still suffocates and strangles this nation and is manifest in every sphere of Black people’s lives down to today, with the searing, obscene expression in the cold eyes of the pig Derek Chauvin’s indifference to the life he stole from George Floyd. But song and struggle for freedom still glows.

Dreams to be free of all that oppresses have been written in verse and prose, theorized in scholarship and revolutionary theory, wished for and fought for and died for. But rare is the time when there is the potential for such dreams to become real.

THIS IS SUCH A TIME. Why?

Because those who rule this country are locked in bitter struggle with each other over how to hold their country together, over how to keep their whole setup, the system that we live under—capitalism/imperialism—going ...

Because they are locked in an irreconcilable struggle over how to cohere and enforce their rule over the people here and around the world whom they oppress and repress...

Because they are divided over how to maintain the U.S. as the top power in the world today...

The deep divisions at the very top of this society are tearing open the shroud of myth and lies that America is the land of “freedom and opportunity”—that “The USA Is the World’s Good Guys.”

The reality that those who rule and their political representatives can no longer rule this country in the way they have in the past could lead to a terrible future for humanity if there is a future at all, yet, at the same time this very fraught situation contains its opposite:

The sharp divide at the top of society also holds the possibility of leading to something very good, but only if we act together and struggle for people like all of you listening to go out and struggle hard with masses of people to get with the revcoms, to get organized now for a radically different future, where we, the masses of people in our millions, could go to work on overcoming all the inequalities, divisions and injustices of the world today. This really could be—a future made possible by a real revolution.

You are in the right place to learn why that is, and why making it so depends on you being a part of what will be perhaps the greatest struggle and achievement in history—making a real revolution in this country.

Tonight you are in Revolution Books, the political and cultural center of the revcoms... or, you are watching this talk on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, the weekly show of the revcoms.

It is The Revcoms who have issued A Declaration, A Call To Get Organized Now For A Real Revolution.

It is the leader of The Revcoms and the foremost political thinker and revolutionary in the world today, Bob Avakian, BA, who has just published a deep, provocative, challenging and inspiring pamphlet: This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible—Why That Is So, And How To Seize On This Rare Opportunity. This work, which is a crucial companion to A Declaration, A Call, is our topic and more, our purpose this evening: to challenge and inspire you to get a copy, read it, grapple with it, take it out to others, and get down with the revcoms, online and on the real.

Let’s be straight up here—calling for people to get organized now for an actual revolution is momentous. It is the most daring call that could be made. Serious. It requires sacrifice. It is complex. It requires a thoroughly scientific approach to deal with all the complexities and difficulties that will be encountered. Revolution requires the most consistently scientific leadership. We have that leadership in Bob Avakian.

Let’s not talk falsely. Maybe you came to Revolution Books tonight having heard the carping, the online snark and slander on the street against BA and the revcoms—in short, all the bullshit that you hear from people who are ignorant or complacent, groveling for their pathetic place in this cesspool of a system and struggling for you to do the same. Let’s say it like it is: they don’t know shit about the problem humanity faces or what is the only real solution. And, they have never read or studied the work BA has done. Bob Avakian has done pathbreaking work to advance the scientific method and approach to revolution for the emancipation of all humanity that we call the new communism. He has answered historically vexing questions that others haven’t even thought of.

A Declaration, A Call puts it like this:

“There never has been a leader like this in this country and there is no other leader like this in the world now. We cannot afford not to follow this leadership if we ever want to get free and put an end to this madness.”

***

We are on the cusp of a moment in history when the two opposed dreams that I began with this evening—the nightmare of the worst that humanity can be, including our species’ possible extinction, and, on the other hand, the dream of a radically different and far better, liberatory world where all humanity could truly flourish. These two dreams, these two realities, stand arrayed against each other. The future really does hang in the balance. What we do will determine which future prevails.

These are not just poetic words—mere metaphor to inspire. This is real, and we are going to go there tonight. We have to. These are the stakes. That you’re here at Revolution Books or watching The RNL Show is a positive step.

But, let’s be real: If I yelled (and do so) “LOOK OUT DANGER IN BACK!!!” you would spin around and do what you could to get out of the way and hopefully help others to do so too.

But are you confronting head up, eyes wide open, the real deadly situation that is bearing down on all of us? Are you turning away from a dread that all the vile monsters of Amerikkkan society that Trump and the Republi-fascist Party and their masters and backers in a section of the ruling class have summoned up from every nook and cranny of the basement are not gone? Are you pissed off and griping that these anti-scientific know-nothings led by Trump are spreading disease and death—but you don’t want to think about the larger reality that they are hardening their forces and preparing to try again for an all-out assault to attain full power?

Have you let yourself be deluded by the Biden/Harris babbling of bipartisanship and their own liberal version of make America great again? Did Biden lull you in his inauguration speech with this:

We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors.... We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature. For without unity there is not peace, only bitterness and fury.... No nation, only a state of chaos....

And, let’s not shirk from the truth... Let’s put it all on the table: Too many bought into the false and phony hope of Obama’s Change You Can Believe In, only to see no fundamental progress, no fundamental change to any of the outrages people care about—from police murder to the continuing and growing obscene, insufferable, life-stealing inequality—instead, what we did get is that the resistance movements that had been growing during the reign of George W. Bush became muted by phony hope and honeyed words, lulled by his image and the hip hop playlists and the surface shine that had all too many progressive and Black people lulled into thinking change had come.

For the white supremacist, Christian fascist movement that had been organizing, growing in strength and virulence over the decades since the 1960s, a Black president was more than they could abide. In Trump they recognized someone who, like Hitler, gave unfiltered vent to all their vile grievances, a lying pig who would shatter all the rules and norms to cement into place a fully white supremacist, patriarchal, xenophobic, bellicose America First fascist society.

And really what is the main thing being achieved by Biden and the top Democrats today who are calling and working to get things done with the Republican fascists? Lowering the temperature and demobilizing those who stand for justice, who rightly took to the streets in righteous rage against continuing police murder and brutality, against the lack of future for our youth, against the rampaging inequality, and the continued destruction of the environment. They’ve got you passive, they’ve got you, as Cornel West says, adjusted to injustice, they’ve got you corralled into becoming them, which should not be where you want to be. Bob Avakian said 16 years ago, now in BAsics 3:12:

“If you try to make the Democrats be what they are not and never will be, you will end up being more like what the Democrats actually are.”

BA in This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible—Why That Is So, And How To Seize On This Rare Opportunity takes the blinders off, shines the penetrating light of a scientific method and approach to understanding the problem we face. He illuminates the potential and the road to a radically different and far better future through a real revolution.

There is plenty of horror that people here and around the world are going through today. And you may have a sense that worse is to come. We get that this can be a pull to recoil and turn away from all that. Do not go there for it will only fuel a greater horror.

What Bob Avakian, BA, brings is hope on a scientific basis. Confronting reality as it actually is—objectively, not just how it feels to you or what you wish it to be—but getting to the root and the dynamics of the problem we face, BA hacks open the potential for something liberating and positive that really could be.

Bob Avakian, in his “New Year’s Statement,” quotes the Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr who wrote of the 2020 election, that it:

“strips bare all the glossy claims about who we are as a country, underscoring the fact that in a meaningful sense, we are not one country at all anymore, but two sharing the same border....”

“The last time that happened [with the Civil War], it took four years and 750,000 lives to force us back into some semblance of oneness. Even then, the seams of the fracture were always visible.”

This is a window into the basic answer to why revolution has become possible now. A Declaration, A Call To Get Organized Now For A Real Revolution puts it straight:

“... the crisis and deep divisions in society now can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means or radically emancipating revolutionary means.”

And that reality—that these divisions in the ruling class and down through the two countries within one border has now given rise to a political situation where there is the possibility that a revolutionary situation could be ripened which holds the possibility of overthrowing this system with all the unnecessary misery it causes at last cast off.

Let’s be clear on what a revolution is. The Declaration is clear:

“A revolution means a force of millions, drawn from many different parts of society and organized for an all-out fight to overthrow this system and replace it with a radically different and much better economic and political system, a socialist system, based on meeting the needs of the people and carrying forward the fight for a communist world where there will finally be an end, everywhere, to the exploitation, oppression, and destruction of the environment that is built into this system of capitalism-imperialism. Anything less than this revolution will completely fail to deal with the root of all the problems or lead to the actual solution.”

To go deeper into this, we are going to show a short video prepared by The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. This short film makes three points that set the stage for understanding why we need a revolution; what it is; and why it is possible now.

The video starts where Bob Avakian begins in This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible... with the first section titled: “First, Some Basic Truths” in which he paints a brief picture of the system we live under. Then, in the second two parts of the video we draw from A Declaration, A Call To Get Organized Now For A Real Revolution to illustrate, first, the potential for this revolution in all the different kinds of people who hate and who have acted against the deep hellacious problems this system brings down and for which it has no fundamental solution; and #2, we briefly bring to life the sharpening conflict in the ruling class as concentrated in the sharp divide between their political representatives: the Republican-Fascist Party and the Democratic Party.

 

[The video clip can be seen here. The words from the video are available in the sidebar.]

 

Let’s step back for a moment to the first of the three segments of the video we just watched, which presented a devastating picture of just some of what the capitalist-imperialist system means today: including the destruction of the environment with the desperate, dangerous flight of millions of refugees, the white supremacy and patriarchy built into the system and the foundation of this country, and it also touches on the system’s relentless compulsion towards war. All this underscores this essential understanding: the system we live under

causes tremendous suffering for people, all over the world, and it poses a growing threat to the future of humanity.

And, do not shirk from this:

... this is reality, and no one can escape this reality. Either we radically change it, in a positive way, or everything will be changed in a very negative way.

If you disagree, if you think that things are bad, but not that bad, perhaps getting better, make the case and let’s get into it and determine what’s objectively true. But again, do not let yourself say: this is too upsetting to me, so I choose not to think about or act in accordance with this reality. To understand why capitalism can’t be reformed, go to revcom.us and read an article titled Commodities & Capitalism—And The Terrible Consequences Of This System; A Basic Explanation by Bob Avakian.

The exploitation and oppression of the capitalist system is governed through a political system of capitalist democracy, or bourgeois democracy, that enforces its oppressive system through all the “institutions of official power and violence—the Congress and the presidency, the courts, and especially the police and the military.”

The last segment in the video, quoting A Declaration, A Call, said the Democrats, in opposing the Republi-fascists, are doing so by trying to keep this oppressive system going by appealing to their base with honeyed words of freedom and justice for all while making minor concessions to a few while their system continues to grind up the lives of billions of people and destroys the planet. The Declaration draws this crucial understanding:

“...in reality, both of these ruling class parties are working to maintain the violent oppressive power, the dictatorship,of this capitalist-imperialist system, with all the horrors for humanity this involves.”

BA says in This Is A Rare Time:

“No matter what promises these politicians make—and no matter what schemes people try to come up with to make things more ‘just’ or ‘equal’ under this system—none of this can change the basic nature of this system and the way it has to operate because of its very nature.”

This is why, as I read earlier, A Declaration, A Call, says:

“Anything less than this revolution will completely fail to deal with the root of all the problems or lead to the actual solution.”

On this foundation, let’s get further into why a real revolution has become possible now. Recall that an actual revolution involves “nothing less than overthrowing this whole system—defeating, disarming and dismantling the murderous armed power and other institutions that enforce this system...”

Take a few seconds to think about what kind of situation would have to exist to be able to make an actual revolution that does that in this, the most powerful imperialist country. (Pause)

In This Is A Rare Time, Bob Avakian plainly puts forth what is necessary for a revolutionary situation:

“A revolution becomes possible, even in a powerful country like this, when three main factors have been brought into being:

“A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the ‘usual way of things,’ that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the ‘normal’ way that people have been conditioned to accept.

“A revolutionary people in the millions and millions, with their ‘allegiance’ to this system broken, and their determination to fight for a more just society greater than their fear of the violent repression of this system.

“An organized revolutionary force—made up of continually growing numbers of people, from among the most oppressed but also from many other parts of society—a force which is grounded in, and is working systematically to apply, the most scientific approach to building for and then carrying out revolution, and which is increasingly looked to by masses of people to lead them to bring about the radical change that is urgently needed.”

Then he says:

“These factors for revolution obviously do not exist right now, but this is one of the rare times when these factors for revolution could be brought into being.”

The first criteria is the key to what has now changed that opens up the possibility that a revolutionary situation could be ripened. “Ripened” is a very important word that A Declaration, A Call uses—because a revolutionary situation is not something that just comes about automatically—it must be fought for. The revolution will not be a matter of two sides lining up good guys here, bad guys there, and when we get enough people someone blows the starting whistle.

We have work to do to bring about the second two criteria—where masses of people lose their allegiance to the system and their determination to fight for a more just society is greater than their fear. And, there is a growing influential organized force that is looked to and that can lead them. These two factors as they mature will then impact the divided ruling class who through unfolding events will be seen as more and more illegitimate in the eyes of the masses of people.

Getting to that situation where a successful revolution could be launched requires that organized force is influencing and ultimately leading millions in relation to what other forces in the society and the world are doing, as well as to unforeseen events, even natural disasters. For example, while it was not a revolution, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, hundreds of cities rose up in righteous rebellions and the Black Panther Party grew faster than they could even deal with. This rapid growth wasn’t only a result of what the BPP was doing the day before, it was this larger event in the world that provoked that response.

Revolution is a complex process that requires scientific leadership. And, we have that leadership in Bob Avakian, who has scientifically studied the strategic questions of preparing for and then making revolution and has developed a pathbreaking strategic synthesis on how to prepare the ground, prepare the people, and prepare the leading forces, the vanguard for revolution and he has developed the strategy for how to lead millions of people when the time is right to go all out in the actual struggle for power and win. This is elaborated in BA’s books, pamphlets, and films available here at Revolution Books and online at revcom.us.

Let’s briefly get into how this sharp divide that is brewing today reveals the kind of crisis in society and government that it is now and which will only grow sharper, deeper, and more disruptive of the normal way in which this society has been ruled; leading to further intensified conflict both at the top of the government and down through different sections of the people.

Think about the fact that the overwhelming majority of the base and the leadership of the Republican Fascist Party fanatically believe that the 2020 election was rigged, the biggest fraud and theft in history. Many of them say and believe that Donald Trump is going to be reinstated, some think in a matter of weeks. This is part of a whole package of lies and lunatic conspiracy theories. Note this: the more far-fetched, the more this fuels their cause.

This is not just talk, but in Republican-controlled state legislatures they are passing law after law that effectively gives these fascists the right—and the “legal” means—to overturn any election that doesn’t go their way. While at the same time, they are further stacking the deck by disenfranchising Black and Latino voters.

There is a method to the madness—the more they sow doubt on the election, or on any fact that contradicts their objectives, the more dust they throw in people’s eyes; it all leads to “who’s to say” what’s true? You know how Trump plays it: “a lot of people say...” and then fill in the blank with whatever he wants his people to believe. Thus the groundwork is laid: the legislatures can say it is not clear who really won, what really happened, and then the fascist-dominated legislature can come to the rescue, clear up confusion, and install their fascists. And in the election of the President, because of the legacy of slavery, a contested election could ultimately be thrown to the House of Representatives dominated by Republican states or to federal courts dominated by Trump’s fascist appointees, and then the stage is set for one kind of “legal” fascist coup. This is in the works right now. It’s already happening. The work is being done. The laws are being passed. The structures are there.

But, they have been and are preparing for a more serious type of coup. Look at the January 6th Trump-led attempted coup at the Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 election. The Republican Fascist Party, their media, and tens of millions of followers are speaking out of three contradictory sides of their large foul mouths saying first, it was peaceful; second, that it was really antifa, Black Lives Matter, with Nancy Pelosi to blame; and third, that it was a just and patriotic event with Ashli Babbitt a martyr at the hands of a Black Democratic cop. The key point here—the conclusion to be drawn from the illogic of these lies is that January 6th is only a foreshadowing of what is to come. The Republi-fascist movement is now more battle-hardened, more lunatic, more aggrieved, more openly racist, xenophobic than ever, if that is even imaginable, and it surely is. Members of the editorial board of Refuse Fascism referred to the January 6th attempted coup as a dress rehearsal, more recently the conservative editor of the Atlantic called it a prelude of what is to come.

And, what about the Democratic opposition? Biden gave an impassioned speech decrying this. But Biden and the Senate leadership are focused on reaching across the aisle—working with Republicans to rebuild U.S. infrastructure to largely benefit big businesses, increase U.S. competitiveness as well as national defense. This only serves to legitimate the fascists and leaves the Democratic base—the decent people, perhaps many of you, who care about injustice—passive, demoralized, and paralyzed as to what you can and should do.

In the House of Representatives the Democrats are right now dramatically exposing much of the reality of the January 6th coup attempt but they could not even get the Republicans to agree to objectively investigate the first outright assault on their Capitol since the British burnt it down in 1814. And, when Texas Democrats fled to Washington to oppose the new fascist election law in Texas, Biden would not meet with them. All this is vivid illustration that this divide will not be bridged but will grow more extreme.

BA writes:

“These divisions among the ruling powers, and in the larger society, cannot be resolved within the framework that has existed, and has held things together, for nearly 150 years, since shortly after the end of the Civil War which led to the abolition of slavery—they cannot be resolved on the basis of the capitalist ‘democracy’ that has been the ‘normal’ means of capitalist rule (dictatorship) for so long.”

Concessions, reforms in response to the struggles of women, LGBTQ people, Black and Latino peoples, were granted as a result of the struggles of the 1960s and the need for the rulers of this country from both parties to be able to promote the U.S. as the “leader of the free world.” BA points out these reforms were always resisted by the Republican Party but they have become convinced

“that these changes have now gone too far, that they threaten to destroy what has held this country together and enabled it to dominate the world.”

And,

“The Republicans have become a fascist party—a party based on open and aggressive white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations—a party convinced that only it deserves to rule ... adopt[ing] what amounts to an undisguised capitalist dictatorship, ready to use violence not only against masses of people but also against its rivals in the ruling class.”

This fascist movement is moving fast to radically change the lives of millions of people. Women’s right to abortion is close to being effectively if not completely outlawed in most of the country with new state laws passed every week and with an anti-women, anti-abortion majority of Trump appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court. And, what is the Democratic Party and the official women’s movement that follows the Democrats doing in response to this? Preparing to figure out how to live with and work with this new Handmaid’s Tale reality... instead of resisting with all they’ve got—here, adjusting to injustice doesn’t begin to capture the outrage of what amounts to cold indifference to the deaths, to state-coerced forced motherhood which is nothing less than the theft of women’s ability and basic right to determine their own lives and their own futures.

What does it mean that these fascists will use violence to enforce their program? One example: in state after Republi-fascist state, “citizens”—meaning fanatic lunatic fascist thugs—can now legally, legally, run down protesters who block a road in peaceful protest with their cars and trucks. In Texas there is a new law under which any fascist—again, “citizen”—can sue doctors and other medical staff who performs an abortion or anyone who helps a woman get an abortion. This is the legitimizing of a force of stormtroopers outside of and above any legal process determining fact and thus the rule of law. This is very important. This is what fascism is. This is the essence of it. Yes, I know, there’s things of “13 characteristics of fascism,” (...“10 characteristics,” etc.)... there are lots of books, lots of articles. But the essence of fascism is the open terroristic dictatorship by those who rule this capitalist-imperialist system, employing violence of the state against the masses of people and discarding traditional democratic forms of rule and civil liberties, as well as employing extralegal thugs to enforce this and terrorize masses of people to accept it.

All this only foreshadows what it will mean, a hint of what it will look like when the rulers can no longer govern and rule in the “normal” way that people have been conditioned to accept. In This Is A Rare Time, Bob Avakian goes into why the Republicans have certain significant advantages in the struggle between these two ruling class parties.

Tonight, I have only touched on the depth of analysis in BA’s piece. Yet, there is one more critical point that I want to read from This Is A Rare Time that paints a vivid picture of how this situation will develop that indicates the potential to seize the time:

"As this situation develops, and the ruling class is more and more unable to rule in the old way, society and daily life for masses of people, from different parts of society, can become increasingly unsettled and chaotic, with frequent “disruptions” of the “normal” way things have been.

"And as the “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way."

Here, what is positive that can come out of this situation is not only revolution to be rid of this oppressive system and its institutions, but also bringing into being a radically new and far better society. The vision and the blueprint for this society is written in a Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America authored by Bob Avakian.

"Nowhere else, in any actual or proposed founding or guiding document of any government, is there any society like this... with a radically new socialist economy that would meet the needs of the people while overcoming all the forms of savage inequalities from the old society, while providing for the most extensive civil rights and dissent, intellectual and culture ferment, an educational system that pursues the truth, and a society that is going to work on the saving the planet and most fundamentally working towards and supporting revolutionary struggle for the emancipation of humanity throughout the world." (from the concluding part of NEW YEAR’S STATEMENT BY BOB AVAKIAN)

My talk tonight has focused on the first of the two questions posed in the title of BA’s article: Why This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible. This to provoke and compel you to go to the work, and get into the second decisive part of this piece which digs into how we go to work now to seize on this rare opportunity.

Regular viewers of The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show will be familiar with the following critical guidance from A Declaration, A Call for how we get started in organizing forces today. This program and BA’s new pamphlet, should make this all the more urgent and on target.

“Organizing people into this revolution means reaching out to all sorts of people—not just where there are protests and rebellions against oppression and injustice, but everywhere throughout society—spreading the word about revolution and getting people together (in real life and online) to grapple with why an actual revolution is necessary, what such a revolution involves, and what kind of society this is aiming for. This will enable people who are new to the revolution to themselves become organizers for this revolution and to recruit more and more people to do the same.”

And:

“On this basis, and through the growing ranks of the revolution acting together as an increasingly powerful force, it will be possible to attract and organize the necessary numbers, and build up the necessary strength, to be in the position to do what needs to be done.”

Taking this up and getting with the revcoms, BA says,

“... is the responsibility of everyone who recognizes the profound need for revolution—and the rare possibility in a time like this to actually make revolution—to wage a tireless, and at times fierce, struggle to win more and more people to make a radical rupture with the confining and degrading terms of this system, and to take up, and act on, the revolutionary orientation and motivation that is put forward in the ‘Declaration and Call.’”

BA cuts deeper, waging a pointed and sharp struggle with the thinking and harmful ways that different strata of people are trapped within the dog-eat-dog, individualist terms of the system. More, he contrasts these mental traps and dead-end roads with the inspiring outlook and life of being a part of something truly worth living for. He begins these polemics with this:

“Instead of ‘staying in your lane,’ and ‘going for self,’ while this system is moving to even more decisively crush any hope for a world worth living in, people need to be looking at the bigger picture, focusing on the greater interests of humanity and the possibility for a far better world—and acting to make this a reality.”

In bringing these first reflections to a conclusion, I want to end with this:

We should recognize the historic momentousness of what A Declaration, A Call puts forth, and the accompanying lifeline of clarity, argument, and direction in Bob Avakian’s This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible—Why That Is So, And How To Seize On This Rare Opportunity.

Fired with a scientific understanding of what really could be—let’s struggle hard for masses of people to take this up themselves with determination and daring. Let’s resolve to reach out

"To everyone who can’t stand this world the way it is... who is sick and tired of so many people being treated as less than human... who knows that the claim of “liberty and justice for all” is a cruel lie... who is righteously enraged that injustice and inequality go on, and on, and on, despite false promises and honeyed words from people in power (or those seeking power)... everyone who agonizes about where things are headed and the fact that to be young now means being denied a decent future, or any future at all... everyone who has ever dreamed about something much better, or even wondered whether that is possible ... everyone who hungers for a world without oppression, exploitation, poverty, and destruction of the environment... everyone who has the heart to fight for something that is really worth fighting for...."

SEIZE THIS RARE TIME AND BE A PART OF THIS REVOLUTION.

Thank you.