Back in 1964, at Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, Mario Savio, a student leader of the Free Speech Movement, made a statement that has rightly been remembered and even become famous. He said:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

I ask you, right now, as the U.S. Supreme Court—the highest court in the most powerful country in the world—is on track to decimate women's fundamental right to abortion in a matter of weeks, to violently slam backwards the half of humanity that is female, to subject women to forced motherhood and all the horror and suffering and the violence this will bring... Is this not such a time?

 If we let the Supreme Court go forward and overturn Roe, over 20 states immediately ban or severely restrict abortion. And that's just the start. More extreme bans are being introduced and passed almost by the day.

In Ohio, Republican Jean Schmidt was asked about the near-total abortion ban she proposed. What if a thirteen year old girl was raped and became pregnant as a result of the rape. Would this child be forced to have her rapist's baby?

“It is a shame that it happens, but there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being,” she said.

An “opportunity?” These people—the fascist lunatic haters of women—have their hands on the levers of the state.

IS THIS NOT SUCH A TIME that is so odious, a time that makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part?

In Louisiana, Republican Danny McCormick proposed a law that would give full constitutional rights of personhood to fertilized eggs from the very moment of conception and charge women who got abortions or people who helped them with HOMICIDE. Arrest, handcuffs, imprisonment and, yes, the death penalty for women who decide they don't want to carry a pregnancy to term... or perhaps women who just suffer miscarriages.

Is this not such a time that you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.

And let's be very clear—banning abortion will affect all women and girls, not just those who are raped or victims of incest, or those who would lose their lives because they have an unsafe pregnancy... forcing women to have children against their will shatters women's lives, it forecloses their dreams and their plans, it traps many in abuse or in poverty, and all of this hits impoverished Black and Brown women especially hard—and it affects ALL women... by making clear that in the eyes of the law and the state and the patriarchal society, they are not full human beings, they are baby-making machines before all else.

So I ask you: Is this not a time for everyone who cares about women and girls and people who care about justice to rise up and indicate to the people who run this society, that unless this is STOPPED, the machine will be prevented from working at all?

Indeed, it is! This is why it is so important, so uplifting, it is so beautiful, it is so hopeful that there were powerful outpourings of protest and resistance last weekend standing up for abortion rights. And why it is so precious that there have been inspiring and daring youth walkouts that have swept this country, in Tennessee and Kentucky, in Colorado and California, in Connecticut and Arkansas, in New York City and Texas. We have heard young women pour out their absolute terror at their future and their fury—yes, their righteous fury—at what is being threatened!

But this is not yet enough—this has to go higher and it has to happen soon. Because it is not enough for people to voice their outrage at what the Court is on track to do, we must bring forward the kind of society-wide sustained, massive, unrelenting, unstoppable struggle from below and from all quarters of society that it becomes clear to the fascists on the Supreme Court and everywhere else that if they try to go forward with taking away the right to abortion, their society—the whole machine—will be prevented from functioning at all!

We need to see rivers and torrents of furious young women and girls and women of all ages—as well as everyone else who cares about justice—taking over the streets and public spaces. Not just for a day, but day after day, growing in size and daring, growing in fury and joy and power. We need to see female athletes wearing green and not just making public statements but saluting and encouraging those in the streets. We need every female celebrity who signed that powerful ad by Planned Parenthood that was in the New York Times last week not just putting their name in support of abortion rights, but using their platforms and influence to call people forward in struggle to save abortion rights now. There are corporations—many headed by females—who have made clear that if abortion is banned where their employees live and work they will help them travel to others states and that is positive, but it is not nearly enough—they need to give their employees permission to walk off work to join the protests to STOP this from happening and they need to join them! People need to shut down freeways and bridges and tunnels and business as usual everywhere.

Everyone watching has a role to play in this—not only actively involving yourself in this, but in stepping in to become part of organizing many, many others to step in with you.

Don't underestimate the danger that is coming if we don't... and don't underestimate our power if we do!

But right at this moment when the danger couldn't be more clear... and when the potential to wake up a force that is mighty enough to stop this danger in its tracks is being indicated through the outpourings that have begun... there is also a louder and louder drumbeat coming from Democratic Party politicians and the "so-called" leaders of the "so-called" pro-choice movement who are slavishly tied to them that it is time to “get realistic” and to channel our fury and our energy off the streets and instead focus on electing Democrats in the fall.

No! This would be deadly! We need to stay in these streets!

This is something warned about in an important recent article by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, who I follow and who is also the author of the New Communism, in an article at revcom.us titled:

The Supreme Court Moves to End Abortion Rights:
“Taking to the Streets,”
And Refusing to Let This Go Down
Bob Avakian Speaks to This Critical Juncture in the Fight for Abortion Rights,
The Road Forward, and Avoiding Dead Ends

Bob Avakian goes into this critical juncture in the fight for abortion rights, the road forward, and this question of avoiding dead ends very deeply and I cannot recommend this article strongly enough. Everyone should get a copy and not just read it, but study it—and share it and discuss it with others. And in the rest of my remarks I am going to draw from it quite heavily.

Why would it be deadly to listen to those telling us that the most realistic thing to do is to go for the elections in the fall?

For one thing, voting for the Democrats in November—after the Supreme Court has ruled—is too late! We need to stop them NOW! It is far harder to win a right back after it is lost than to defend it while we still have it.

Besides, voting has never been how real change comes about. To cite one obvious example, as Bob Avakian does in his recent piece, even the right to vote was not won through voting! It was won through sitting in, marching, going to jail, going on hunger strike, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama even knowing that there was white supremacist law enforcement and Good Ole Boy Klansmen on the other side ready to inflict brutal violence.

As the great abolitionist leader and former slave, Frederick Douglass, said so well, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will!”

And the problem with relying on the Democrats goes even deeper. The truth is: these Democrats have actually aided the assault on abortion rights. For decades, they have sought “common ground” with the fanatical Christian fascists who are waging their war on women. There can be no common ground with forced motherhood! The Democrats have run anti-abortion candidates. And they have consistently ceded the moral high ground to these fascists. Think about it. For years Hillary Clinton, and others, insisted that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Why should it be rare for a woman to have control over her life and her body? This is not a bad thing, this is a great thing—a beautiful thing! Something that should be celebrated and defended and expanded. We need abortion on demand and without apology!

And yes, this IS about controlling women. This is another thing the Dems—and most of the so-called movement these days—won't say. They like to talk about bodily autonomy in the abstract or healthcare in the abstract and they like to use words like “people who can become pregnant” instead of saying the word WOMAN. But this IS about controlling women—it is about tightening and reasserting the chains of thousands of years of patriarchal enslavement.

Of course it is critically important that we all stand against the vicious, bigoted attacks on LGBTQ people—especially those coming down on trans youth! But in its essence and at its core, the assault on abortion is about controlling and dominating women and we have to tell the truth about it. The fascists certainly do. I recall all the way back in the 1990s, when I was defending the only abortion clinic in all of North Dakota when it was under siege—the Christian fascist fanatics literally dropped to their knees and recited this prayer: "Lord, please break this curse of independence that has afflicted women." Some ten years ago, at the last and only abortion clinic in Mississippi, I heard these Christian fascists scream at women and at us saying everything began to go wrong when women got the right to vote! And just about two weeks ago, when I was in Kentucky after that became the first state to effectively shut down all abortion access, I had one of these Christian fascist militia types tell me straight up, that women should submit to their husbands as their husbands submit to the lord, just like it says in the Bible, Ephesians 5:22. And when I challenged him about what it says in Deuteronomy, that women who are not virgins when they get married should be stoned to death by all the men of the village, he 100 percent agreed.

Now I want to stay on this for just another minute because I know this is controversial. Every time we are out, someone changes the chants or their speech from the word “woman” to people with uteruses or just people. And sometimes they do this by saying, abortion doesn't only affect women it also affects—trans, poor people, people of color, etc. etc.

Well, of course that is a true statement—but it assumes one of two things. Either everyone knows it affects women so that goes without saying, or that no one cares enough about women to fight it on that basis so let's talk about others who will be affected to get people to care.

Well, in fact—a great many don't know this is about women. Millions and millions and millions of people have been brainwashed to not see the woman at all—to think the only life involved is the fetus, the so-called baby, and to discount completely the life of the actual full human being, the woman or girl. And the truth is that many are so accustomed to the abuse and disrespect and oppression of women that they don't feel ready to fight it on that basis. Which is all the more reason it has to be called out and named and fought against!

So we have to tell the truth—this is a fight about the control over WOMEN! And we have to fight to unleash the one force that is powerful enough to defeat this—that is the unbridled fury of millions and millions of women and girls rising up against thousands and thousands of years of patriarchal chains—of the way that women have been treated as punching bags and less than human and sex objects and breeders of children. The fury of women against the ways they have been shamed and hunted down, and stalked and spit on, kidnapped and beaten down, and raped and pimped out. And we have to rally the fury of all who care about women and care about justice generally to wage this fight NOW.

At the same time, it is necessary to confront the even deeper reasons the Dems continually act the way they do—and can only act the way they do—and why elections are not and never can be, under this system, the means through which people can effect real change. And BA goes deeply into this in this article as well—he exposes the reality that these Democrats are representatives not of the people, but of the system that rules over us, the system of capitalism-imperialism. And their primary role is to keep people believing in this system and keep it functioning smoothly—including keeping people believing that they can win some changes within this system and that it is worth putting up with this system, while the reality is that the oppression of women, as well as white supremacy and other oppression, and massive relations of exploitation not just in this country but all around the world are built into this system and cannot be ended under the system.

And I want to quote from him in this article:

An essential reason for the Democrats’ increasing capitulation to the fascists is this: While the fascists are determined to rally their “base” behind their lunatic views and their aggressively oppressive and repressive “agenda,” and they eagerly welcome the ways this challenges and tears up the “established norms,” the Democrats are dedicated to an increasingly failing attempt to maintain those “norms” and to continue trying, even as they fail, to “overcome the divisions and polarization in society.” This is an orientation and an approach that is bound to perpetuate very real horrors, including male supremacist as well as white supremacist oppression, brutality and terror, and to continually give rise to even greater horrors. 

Going fully into why only a real revolution can solve this and why—these very sharpening divisions among the rulers not only hold the potential for tremendous horror, but also could provide the openings to bring forward a real revolution that brings this system down and opens the door to building a whole new society on the road to emancipation—goes beyond the scope of what I can get into tonite more fully.

But I will invite and challenge everyone watching to not only ask, but seek answers—and act on those answers—to these big questions:

Why is it that 50 years after women won the right to abortion is this right coming under such sustained and now existential attack by Christian fascist lunatics at the highest level of state and throughout society?

Why are we still living in a society that drips with white supremacy—from the unrelenting murder by police and mass incarceration to the resurgence of vigilante and mob violence like the horrific massacre we saw just days ago in Buffalo, NY?

Why do we live in a society and world that is ravaged by imperialist wars and now flirting with world war three that could go nuclear and potentially destroy human civilization?

Why is it that despite summit after summit and all the honeyed words of politicians is this country and system still accelerating the destruction of our planet?

What does all this have to do with the system we live under and the need for a radically new and different system, brought about through a real revolution?

And is that possible, how could it be made, what could that open up for humanity?

And you'll find deep answers in the work of Bob Avakian, which is available at revcom.us, including in the important article I have been emphasizing.

And we bring this to you, rooted in BA's leadership and the new communism he has developed, every week on the RNL Show at youtube.com/therevcoms which you should subscribe to and watch regularly and spread.

And I urge you to learn about and join the Revolution Club to powerfully represent for this revolution and lift other people's sights to a whole better way the world could be even as you, yourself, are learning more about this revolution.

The youth who are so righteously furious that they have been born at a time when it seems there is no hope for the future, don't have to be denied a future worth living. There is a way out and a basis for hope and daring on a scientific foundation: that is what this revolution represents!

At the same time, in closing, I want to stress that all of us—truly all of us who care about women and justice in general—whether we see, or are coming to see, the need for revolution or whether we are in fact going to vote for the Democrats and believe it is possible to make this system work for the people—this fight over abortion is a crucial battle in the fight for the future.

Now is the time to pull out all the stops, to not rest on the level of protest and struggle we have seen so far but to build on it leap after leap and take it higher.

Join in the student walkouts tomorrow—make them as powerful and mass and furious as they can be.

And all hands on deck, starting now to reach every corner of society and every person of influence and every network of people to bring them into massive society-wide struggle next Thursday, May 26 to make a huge leap in shutting this whole country down.

Together, let's really make good on the orientation that—as I began—this is a time when the

operation of the machine has become so odious, has made us so sick at heart, that we can't take part; we can't even tacitly take part. And we've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and we've got to make it stop. And we've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless we're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.