The masses of people won a victory today—a bittersweet victory. Three racists who had hunted down and murdered Ahmaud Arbery for the “crime” of being Black and jogging through a white neighborhood were found guilty of murder… who were told to “go home and shower” by the pigs who came to the scene to “investigate”… who videotaped the whole thing from the time they jumped into their pickup truck until they gunned him down… who went free for months until public outcry and mass struggle finally forced a trial… were found GUILTY. Rightly—and righteously—so.

But while this was a victory for the struggle of the people, it was NOT a vindication of the system.

That SYSTEM that trained these racists that think they had a “right” to stalk and kill this young Black man in a modern-day lynching;

That SYSTEM had a law that from slavery days had been used to justify the lynching of Black people in the 1800s and which served as a cornerstone of these murderers’ defense, a law which was only repealed out of embarrassment;

That SYSTEM covered this up at first and the horrible heinous nature of the crime only became known because the video leaked out by mistake;

That SYSTEM had to go through two prosecutors, one of whom is now charged themselves with obstruction of justice, before they found one who could prosecute it;

And that SYSTEM put a nearly all-white jury in judgment of this.

This is a SYSTEM that included openly racist vomit from the defense attorneys, attacking Black clergy who attended the trial and demanding they be barred and launching a disgusting and utterly irrelevant personal attack on the murdered Ahmaud Arbery in their closing remarks.

And here’s the thing. Usually, when this kind of thing happens and there is no video, this kind of racist shit flies. It was only because of the mass struggle that this even came to light, that it was put on trial and that the verdict was won.

But we have to ask ourselves—is this the best we can hope for? Is this the kind of victory we can take satisfaction in? Where racists in and out of uniform murder and brutalize and once in a blue moon someone is held accountable because something just happened to come to light and the combination of the people’s struggle and real exposure got a little bit of justice? That over and over again, people like Ahmaud Arbery are held to be “expendable” and deemed worthy of contempt?

One of the defense attorneys cruelly mocked Ahmaud Arbery for "not having lived up to his potential." This is a system that grinds up millions of youth like Ahmaud every year, that puts them in prison or the street or the morgue, that tells them they are good for nothing but a boot up the ass and a bullet in the brain, as the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has said.

We need to abolish this system and the white supremacy woven into every fiber of this society. And to do this we need a revolution. Mass struggle—like happened around Ahmaud Arbery and like millions of us waged last summer after the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by the official enforcers of this system—is very important to making revolution. It is essential.

But that mass movement has to be transformed into a movement for an ACTUAL REVOLUTION—actually overthrowing this white supremacist system of capitalism-imperialism in a fight of millions to shatter, defeat and dismantle the forces of violent repression used against the people, when conditions for that come together.

That is what we revcoms are about. And that is what you need to be about.

And here’s something else: there’s a showdown coming in this country. It’s building up every day—between a side that wants to hammer in fascism, which is an even more repressive form of even more blatant white supremacy, male supremacy and chauvinism toward and hatred of people who are not American; and a side that opposes this. While the people won today, let’s not forget that just a few days ago one of their gunmen walked free, for killing two unarmed fighters against white supremacy and police terror. The fascists, the racists, are—and will remain on—the offensive. We must awaken the people who love justice to get together to wrench a truly liberating future out of the madness this system is bringing down.

Get with this revolution. Learn about it. Get into the work of Bob Avakian, the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism. Become part of it. Now—there is no time to lose.