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Opening Commentary by Andy Zee from The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, July 21, 2022

Editors’ note: This commentary was written together with direction for illustration and visual effects, including the playing of an illustrated version of the poem “All Played Out” by Bob Avakian with music by William Parker. Read it, then watch it.

Andy Zee Flips the Script on the Online Haters Attacking Bob Avakian & the Revcoms

Welcome to The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. This is episode number 111 on July 21, 2022. My name is Andy Zee. I’m the host of the show, and I’m coming to you from Los Angeles, California.

You are watching the show of the “brainwashed”... the dupes of the Cult of Bob Avakian... Be very careful: you might learn that there’s a way out from the madness of the system we live under, a way to make an actual revolution to overthrow the system that is destroying the environment, that is robbing women of their humanity, whose police murder, incarcerate, oppress, demonize, and degrade in thousand ways: Black people, immigrants, and Native people whose land was stolen in genocide.

Pay attention and be aware.

On this program you will see, hear and experience Bob Avakian, BA, the revolutionary leader who liberals and a demoralized, defeated, pathetic left are scared shitless to have you experience and engage.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have heard the blowhard rants online, the oinkers on social media, the scare headlines on sordid websites from so-called democratic socialists who are neither, liberals and outright fascists...

All these are: Bullshit and lies from those who despise revolution… who feed at the trough of an NGO-satiated empire… fools, wannabe and actual police who want to pacify you as they satisfy themselves with weak ass shit while humanity is being led off a cliff.

All this and more, we take to task in today’s RNL Show: so-called “progressives” opposed to truly liberating progress. Liberals for whom law and order trumps risking something to fight against injustice and oppression, who now find themselves in unity with fascists in their attack on the radically different leader who has developed a whole new framework for human emancipation, Bob Avakian.

Bob Avakian, whose life has been dedicated to the emancipation of humanity. Who, for over 50 years since he came of age in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, then working with Black Panther Party in their revolutionary days, and who, when others of that generation gave up on revolution, BA went to work, hard work, to understand how indeed revolution could be made in a country like this, how that revolution could stay on the revolutionary road and be a society that people would want to live in and would thrive as we collectively could go work to transform the whole world.

Bob Avakian has worked on and developed an approach to questions and problems of involving the masses of people who today are profoundly divided in overcoming all these divisions in the course of a great struggle to overcome all forms of exploitation and oppression everywhere.  He has worked on problems and pathways to an emancipatory society that other political theorists and leaders haven’t even begun to think about. The work BA has done is not the stuff of pipe dreams but grounded in reality and a scientific approach to radically transforming that reality.

Bob Avakian is completely different than the endless stream of bourgeois politicians who are put forward as “leaders,” whose goal is to maintain one variation or another of this system of capitalism-imperialism that is founded on and perpetuates itself through cruel and literally life-stealing exploitation, murderous oppression, and massive destruction, in all parts of the world. BA is a revolutionary who bases himself on the scientific understanding that this system must finally be overthrown through an organized struggle involving millions of people, and replaced with a system that is oriented to and capable of meeting the most fundamental needs of humanity and enabling humanity to become fit caretakers of the earth. (from Bob Avakian—A Radically Different Leader—A Whole New Framework for Human Emancipation)

So BE CLEAR. When websites and blowhards warn those of you who have stood up with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights against the brutal life-stealing assault on women’s right to abortion to control their own lives, to get you to calm down, to give up, and to work within the system of their bourgeois elections where you get to choose between defenders of the very system that oppresses billions of people here and around the world. Be clear that when they shout “CULT!” this is what they are trying to get you to do. And the liberating vision and plan for revolution to free all of humanity that Bob Avakian has forged and the movement he leads—the revcoms—is what they want to keep from you.

Bob Avakian, A Radically Different Leader—A Whole New Framework for Human Emancipation

 

The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. That’s who we are. That’s what we bring. The leadership, the strategy, and the goal for the emancipation of all humanity. If you have the conviction, the heart, the courage—especially the courage of your convictions—this show is for you.

We are going into battle. A political fight for this show and this leader. Over the next five weeks we are recruiting you—the audience for The RNL Show—to go to work, week after week in a campaign to build the viewership of this, The RNL Show, to bring to people far and wide the liberating truth that there IS A WAY out of the madness. That revolution is the solution. It is the hope of the hopeless. It’s real and it’s needed. And that Bob Avakian is a leader, is a person that you, and millions more like you, need to know about and get into. To get this campaign into high gear, on Monday night, July 25, at 8 pm Eastern Time, 7 pm Central, and 5 pm here on the West Coast along with my co-host Sunsara Taylor, we are going to host a nationwide Zoom to answer and flip the script on the attacks on Bob Avakian; the revcoms, and Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights. We are going to get into why and how challenging and transforming how people think is a key part of making revolution.

The most ridiculous lie of all is that Bob Avakian is a “cult leader” who advocates blind faith... he is the most rigorous scientific person who has developed a way for people of all levels of education to be able to understand and change the world. Later in today’s program, we are going to show an excerpt from a speech he gave in 2012 from which we take the name of this program, Revolution—Nothing Less!, a segment on how the science of revolution is like the Rosetta Stone, an archeological find that unlocked much about ancient Egypt.

A scientific approach to revolution—the actual reason, the basis for revolution lies in the workings of the system we live under and the reality that it cannot do away with exploitation and oppression, it cannot be reformed, and the reality that many people yearn for a world without oppression. Bob Avakian goes at this in many different ways from high theory to biting exposure of the system’s crimes, to creative and funny ways. Here I want to play the first three verses of a spoken word piece he wrote, with music by the great jazz bassist William Parker:  

All Played Out

We must broadly unite

To carry out the fight

To resist the crimes

Of this system

But on the real revolution

Is the only solution

So we need to call out

Things whose time has run out

Which keep people in chains Suffering unbearable pain

These things are:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

Capitalist vultures—

Big-time and world-wide exploiters—

Preaching

About "personal responsibility,"

Ranting

About “predators” and criminality

Terrorizing the youth

In the inner cities

While you loot

Everywhere you see

Slaughter pеople and rain destruction

Through crimes untold—

All to еnforce your rule

And amass your gold

On the backs of billions

Chaining them in slavery

New and old

Your time in history—

It's gone—it's:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

This puffed-up

Stuff

About “the land of the free

And the home of the brave”—

A country that built itself on bodies

Of slaves

And ruthless, genocidal robbery

That spreads its empire

Through plunder

Driving countless people

Under

With its bloody

Red-white-and-blue rag

Unfurled—

All this pompous

Nonsense

About “the leader of the free world”—

That's:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

Vicious politicians and mindless mobs

Screaming and threatening

Hounding people

Driven from their homelands—

Growling and howling: “speak English!...

Go home!”

These fools aren't saying anything

Worthwhile

In any tongue—

It's the same old song

They've always sung:

“Fade deeper in the shadows

Suffer in silence

While you slave

To create wealth

We crave—

It's our way

Backed up by violence.”

This garbage is:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

The haters who have attacked BA, the revcoms, and Rise Up have in their vicious attack opened up some real potential by putting these names before hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if we seize it, to build the audience for this show, to compel and inspire people to look into Bob Avakian, to attract people to get with and join the Revolution Clubs.

I say this recognizing that the haters who attack us have done real harm. There has been a trajectory of these attacks beginning with some pathetic little “pro-choice” groups who refused to join the struggle to stop the Supreme Court from overturning abortion rights, who launched the first attack on Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights with the blatant lie that it was a “front” for syphoning money to the revcoms led by Bob Avakian. These lies were then repeated by the sensationalist website the Daily Beast, then repeated and amplified by the respectable progressive website The Intercept, then picked up by the fascist Daily Caller founded by Tucker Carlson, then mutating to the website Law Enforcement Today ... this is the way counterrevolution works... what we have called on this show, a “woke neo-McCarthyist counterrevolution.” McCarthy being a fascistic U.S. senator in the 1950s who along with Richard Nixon went on a national witch hunt to crush resistance and the potential for rebellion and support for revolutionary struggles around the world by tarring people with a “red scare” that did tremendous damage to lives and to the people’s struggles.

Today’s RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show is going to work on flipping that script. By spreading the voice of Bob Avakian, by demolishing the bullshit of the cancel culture that, truth be told, is canceling the future for humanity.

In today’s show, as I said, you are going to hear Bob Avakian speak on the importance of knowing what is the actual reality we face, what is true, and the science of communism to understand that complexity of reality in his piece on the Rosetta Stone.

We are going to hear our correspondent Rafael Kadaris take on and take down that democratic socialist blowhard Hasan Piker.

Also today, Sunsara Taylor is going to expose The Intercept’s hit piece, followed by a member of our RNL team delivering the responses of people calling out The Intercept. Last, Noche Diaz, national spokesperson for the Revolution Clubs, will speak about the “Galaxies at the Edge of Time”—the incredible view back in time of the formation of the universe as seen through the Webb Telescope.

But first, I want to go back to “All Played Out” by Bob Avakian and play the last four verses, which capture the frivolous yet destructive cancel culture, a desiccated left that mimics the ruling class, and much of the essence of the bullshit that characterizes the attacks against BA, the revcoms, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and all who took and are still determined to fight for the right to abortion:

Tabloid addiction

And gossip slinging—

Treating as prominent

What is really trivial

Making what really matters

Seem invisible

Acting like mobs

In Roman arena

Sneering and “snarking”

With a vicious demeanor

Building yourself up

By tearing other people down:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

Putting up with all this

Madness

Even though you know it's wrong—

Being passive—

Thinking how they want you thinking

Acting just to get along

Singing that old song

That though the crimes are terrible

And massive

“Nothing can be done about this

Nothing can change—

Because of ‘human nature’

Things are bound to be this way

Revolution—that was tried

And it failed

Communism—voice dissent

And they'll haul you off to jail;

With communism

They take away your freedom.”

We say that's just wrong—

Plus there's a new synthesis—

There are speeches

Books with deep analysis

But you don't read them

Won't hear them

Or go near them—

You remain in paralysis Like that you're:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

A so-called “left” that, to tell the truth

Finds it frightening

And distasteful

To change the world—

Radically—

At its root—

Disgraceful!

A "left" that is content

With posing

Devoid of rage

Or joy

Its passion spent deceiving mimic

Miming what it claims to be opposing

Rejects the path of revolution

Insists there can be only one “solution”

That is viable

And desirable—

Reform

Within the confines of this system

Change conforming

To the dictates of this brutal order

Talks forever of “democracy”—

Cover for dictatorship

Of bourgeoisie

Politics of “identity”

That really comes back down to

“me.”

If it speaks of “socialism,”

It is tired out

Dried up dogma—

No reality—

Lacking fire, ferment, and conviction

Impoverished imagination

Lowered vision

The change it talks about

Is paltry fiction

Lifeless

Desiccated

Can't lead anyone

To be emancipated

A “left” like that is:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

This whole damn system

Root and source

Of all this madness:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

Rupture, advance

Beyond all that

No doubt—

Putting an end

To this insanity—

Working for revolution

To emancipate all humanity:

That’s what we got to be all about

All the rest that poses

And opposes

What cries out to be done-It needs to be over

And gone

It's:

ALL PLAYED OUT!

 

(“All Played Out,” by Bob Avakian. Music by William Parker. Ft. Yoni Kretzmer. Ft. Zhenya Strigalev. Ft. Ben Syverson. Ft. Brian Forbes)

Help Make 2024 Our Year—a Year of Revolution! 
Donate to Revcom.us

From the genocide in Gaza, to the growing threat of world war between nuclear powers, to escalating environmental devastation… the capitalist-imperialist system ruling over us is a horror for billions around the world and is tearing up the fabric of life on earth. Now the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class, between fascist Republicans and war criminal Democrats, is coming to a head—likely during, or before, the coming elections—ripping society apart unlike anything since the Civil War. 

Bob Avakian (BA), revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, has developed a strategy to prepare for and make revolution. He’s scientifically analyzed that this is a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible, and has laid out the sweeping vision, solid foundation and concrete blueprint for “what comes next,” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America

The website revcom.us follows and applies that leadership and is essential to all this. We post new materials from BA and curate his whole body of work. We apply the science he’s developed to analyze and expose every key event in society, every week. Revcom.us posts BA’s timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists), including his social media posts which break this down for people every week and sometimes more. We act as a guiding and connecting hub for the growing revcom movement nationwide: not just showing what’s being done, but going into what’s right and what’s wrong and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force.

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but goes up to a whole different level!

So what should you give to make 2024 our year—a year of revolution? 
Everything you possibly can! 
DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!    

Your donations contribute to:

  • Promotion of BA on social media and the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show 
  • Strengthen revcom.us as an accessible, secure, robust website able to rise to the challenge of meeting the extraordinary demands of navigating the storms and preparing for revolution in this pivotal, unprecedented year
  • Fund revcoms to travel to national “hotspots,” where extreme contradictions are pulling apart the fabric of this country and creating the possibility of wrenching an actual revolution out of this intensifying situation
  • Expand the reach and coverage of revcom.us
  • Printing and distribution of key Revcom materials including the Declaration and Proclamation