To Those Who Ask:

Here's What Good It WILL Do to Shut It Down on April 14

March 28, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Some people say... “What good did all that fighting back and standing up do? Nothing’s changed... they still have their power... and we still gotta do what we gotta do.”

That’s wrong. But let’s say why. And let’s say how we need to be seeing this and what we need to be doing and—what going all-out to organize massive outpourings on April 14 has to do with that.

What good did it do?

What good did it do when people in that hellhole they call Ferguson stood up and when people all over began standing with them?

It dragged out the lies of this system and the powers who run it, the capitalist-imperialists. It showed their ass before the whole world—not ONLY their lies about Michael Brown and all the other brothers and sisters that they have murdered in cold blood... it forced out the truth of how their pigs hound and torture and extort and brutalize and lie and MURDER our youth and those who are older as well... it made millions of people all over the world aware of how people REALLY live right here, in the “greatest country in the world”... it forced people to look back into the whole history and the real present-day reality of this “land of the thief and home of the slave.”

What good did it do when people went in the face of all the enemy’s shit and wouldn’t back down? It dragged out and showed up their lies about the people on the bottom of society, those they have cast off and fated to an early death or prison or to the hell of being a woman trying to make it through this ugly world of theirs, or an immigrant forced to scrape and scratch for work: the lie that “those people” can’t do anything and aren’t worth anything and deserve to be despised and tormented. It blew that big lie away and it inspired all kinds of people, MILLIONS of people, to say and feel “Black Lives Matter” and “Latino Lives Matter” and to not just say it but to put something on the line to fight for that.

What good did it do when those who catch the hardest hell every day refused to go back into their corner when the system’s mouthpieces and bootlickers came out and said calm down? It showed that if those on the bottom DO stand up, others will be inspired and join them. When the people in Ferguson didn’t bow down, it showed everyone that the courage and daring and smarts that people use against each other in all kinda shameful stuff every day can be aimed at where it really needs to be aimed: against the system which has kept people down since Day One, which has declared war on the people and aims to either get them to kill each other off, or exterminate them itself. And when people rose up like that it made it harder for the enemy to do the foul, evil shit that they do, here and all over the world, in the way they like to and need to do it—like they’re the “good guys,” like they’re the ones with right on their side.

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What good did it do? Look here. It’s like they’ve got people locked down in a huge prison with walls that seem so high and strong you can never get out. But when the brothers and sisters, when those comrades, in Ferguson rose up? It showed that those huge walls have cracks. Cracks that are most of the time invisible but that run very, very deep. And the way people stood up and rose up and fought back, day after day, against the clubs and tear gas and semi-automatic rifles and goddamn tanks, made those cracks wider. It showed the true nature of this system and brought other people forward against it. And it showed the potential to bring down those walls, and to bring in a whole better world... IF the people get organized, and IF we not only keep rising up but do it better and spread it further and make it stronger... learning as we go. Like what has to be done on April 14.

Those who got beaten and gassed... those who caught a case off that... they are freedom fighters and heroes and we all of us need to honor them and we need to defend them, and bring forward others to defend them too. They put it all on the line to bring in a new day.

They opened the door—you can’t pretend they didn’t. Question now is, are YOU gonna walk through it? Or are you gonna do what the people who REALLY call the shots—the oppressors, these pigs, these imperialists, your REAL enemy—want you to do? You gonna join in on April 14? Or just lay in the cut?

These oppressors carry out crimes all over. Bombing and killing and occupying people all over the world. Plundering and ruining the environment and putting the whole future in danger. Treating women, half of humanity, like they’re some kind of “lower form of life.” There’s billions whose interests lie in ending this system, and potentially will fight for and welcome a new day.

And there is leadership to carry this struggle forward—forward in the life-and-death battle we face right now to re-take the offensive in the fight for justice, and ALL the way forward, to emancipation. A vision of a whole new society, where there is no exploitation and no oppression and none of these conflicts where they set people against each other. A vision—and a way to get there, for real.

Listen up. We have a strategy for revolution—a way to really bring forward the millions we need—and the basics of a strategy that could really meet and defeat their instruments of violent repression, when things get to the point when their system is in even deeper shit and millions of people are searching for answers and leadership. We have a party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, that could lead this and is out here every day preparing people and preparing themselves to do so. And we have a leader—one of those rare and very precious leaders who don’t come around all the time—who can show the way and IS showing the way to freedom, every single day: Bob Avakian, or BA. Here’s what BA said, in a special message a year ago, “A Call to Revolution“:

[W]hat we do matters a great deal. Our lives should be, and can be, about something with meaning and purpose that is really worth living for and fighting for. Why should we do what they want us to do—killing and crippling each other, trying to beat down or beat out each other, ending up in jail, or paralyzed, or dead at an early age—instead of joining together to go up against the system that has got us in this mess in the first place? Why should we accept the lies that people who are of a different color, or live in a different place, or speak a different language, or love in a different way, are less than human and deserve to be locked up, or beaten down, or murdered? Why should girls and women be treated like things, whose only value is to be used for sex and having babies? Why should we go along with the sickening culture of this system which says money is more important than people, and people are only a means to make money? Why should we believe that “it’s all in god’s hands,” when all this horror and suffering is completely unnecessary and could be ended? Why should we accept the way things are, or just try to make things a little bit better, still living within this system that will keep on destroying the lives of human beings, and denying a decent future to the youth, all over the world?

You need to check this out, deeply. And right now you need to get with the next huge step we’re taking to getting free: April 14, when people are gonna Shut It Down all across the country against these murders by police.

This can be something really powerful—IF you take this up. People in the streets, once again but this time bigger, fiercer, saying “NO, we ain’t going for your reports and commissions and band-aids and cover-ups, we are out here for the TRUTH. We ain’t bowing down to your pigs and your jails. We are out here to STOP these murders. We are out here to stop this whole genocidal thing those murders are part of. And we are out here to say to millions, you gotta get with this struggle!”

As BA said, at the end of his “Call to Revolution”:

“The challenge is there. The leadership is there. What’s needed...is you.”

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