1. What happened?

On Sunday, a recording was leaked of three Los Angeles City Council members and a labor leader talking shit about Black people, gay people, Oaxacans (people from a state in Mexico who are oppressed within Mexican society) and others. They did this while they were figuring out how to divide perks and spoils among themselves, their supporters and “their communities.” Nury Martinez, the president of the City Council, was particularly vile in her attacks—comparing the Black son of a gay council member to a “monkey,” as well as other similar garbage. The others either joined in or said nothing.

Other politicians, all the way up to Biden, rushed to condemn this and dissociate themselves, and to call for their resignations. Particularly for the Democrats—who try to get the oppressed to think that voting for Democratic politicians, or even striving to become Democratic politicians themselves, is the way to “move up” in this system—this was very bad. So they all had to say, whatever they thought, how “bad” and “unacceptable” this was. (Never mind that Biden was a major engineer of the mass incarceration and police repression bills of the early 1990s, and now talks about how much he wants to allot even more money for police. Never mind that he even bragged in 2020 about how well he could work with the outright racist senators who openly supported segregation back in the day.)

2. Why did it happen?

The fact is that capitalism-imperialism is a system based on “looking out for number one.” Capitalism-imperialism sets individuals against each other in a fight for survival—“I gotta get mine.” Capitalism-imperialism oppresses whole nationalities and groups of people, and sets them against each other—“it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and we gotta get ours.” To justify this, the system utilizes, promotes and saturates the whole society with racist ideas from the vilest to more “sophisticated.” In a system like this, the most merciless and vicious sharks are the ones who rise to the top.

But there’s more. Capitalism-imperialism is a worldwide system, ripping off and exploiting people in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America in ways even worse—far worse—than they do people here. And then it trains people who live here from the first day they pledge allegiance to the flag to defend that empire and be proud of that domination.

Those who become politicians in this system are the ones who learn how to play that game—sometimes crudely, sometimes quietly, sometimes behind your back and sometimes right in your face, like Trump and the Republi-fascists… but however they play it, they follow the same rules.

None of this excuses Martinez and the others. But these are small fish. They are tools and wannabes of a system. Instruments of domination in a system of exploitation. Whoever replaces them will play the same game—maybe with a little more self-control, but so what? The game—that is, the system and its rules—won’t change.

This is why all the stuff about “representation as the answer” is bullshit. Representation in a vicious, horrific system just keeps it going. It needs to be overthrown, and the whole system replaced with something better.

3. The final and most important question is this: Where are the interests of humanity?

This system of capitalism-imperialism is killing our planet, and we don’t even know whether there will be future generations at all. This system of capitalism-imperialism grinds people to death by the billions, day in, day out, year in, year out. It degrades people and demeans them, drumming it into everyone that “some races, some genders, some groups” are inferior. WE DON’T NEED THIS SHIT. IT IS KILLING HUMANITY—HERE AND ALL OVER THE WORLD.

What we DO need is REVOLUTION. Revolution to overthrow this system, to get rid of it, and to bring in a whole new one—a socialist system. This revolution is the first step on the road to a communist world where there would be no more exploitation, no more oppression and no more antagonistic conflicts between different groups of people. 

We have the leadership for that revolution in Bob Avakian, BA—a leader who has stayed true to the masses of people for decades and has advanced humanity’s understanding of how to get free of this madness. We have the strategy to make this revolution that he’s developed, and the plan for what happens afterward in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, that BA has authored. And we are not talking about something far-off either—things are coming to a head in a lot of ways right now; that makes the need for revolution more urgent, and the chance for revolution more possible.

But we need to get busy, right now. And in terms of these divisions, BA has put it this way:

Instead of snarking and sniping at each other, and being divided by “identities,” people should be working to unite everyone, from every part of society, who can be united in the fight against oppression and injustice, with the goal of putting an end to this system that is the source of this oppression and injustice.

You can learn more about this revolution by watching The Revolution, Nothing Less! YouTube show, or going to www.revcom.us. And you can hook up with it by getting with the revcoms, @TheRevcoms.

Get with this revolution!