Posts by issue number/Posteos por número de la edición

During my now 65 years as a political activist, I have witnessed many things, three of which I want to single out as being of lasting significance. My appreciation of each of them today comes not so much from my “having been there,” but from an understanding of their significance gained over time, with the help and input of many comrades and friends.

1. THE SIXTIES

There is a mistaken impression that “the sixties” was an American phenomenon. What we now call “the sixties,” was actually a global upsurge of resistance and revolution extending from the late fifties through the mid-seventies. It embraced both rebellions in the advanced capitalist countries as well as socialist and anti-colonial revolutions in the Third World. 1968 alone was a year of global rebellion much like 1848. It saw the student-worker revolt in France, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the explosion of the Cultural Revolution in China, the massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico, the popular resistance to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the birth of the Palestinian resistance at the battle of Karameh, the Naxalite rebellion in India, martial law declared in Uruguay in response to the Tupamaros, as well as the urban uprisings in the U.S. following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the growth of the Black Panther Party. (See my chronology of 1968 posted on www.dissident.info.)

What is important to take away from the particular experience in the U.S. is what a growing revolutionary situation can look like. It is commonplace for people who were not there, or for people who were there but have been “recouped” by the ruling class, to sneer at how foolish people must have been to think that there could have been a revolution. Really? Let's take a look.

The first ingredient of a revolutionary situation is a severe crisis in the ruling class that causes it to split and not be able to rule in the old ways. Such a political crisis does not necessarily arise from an economic crisis. In fact, the period of so much intense upsurge in the sixties, during which the ruling class was very much thrown on the defensive politically, coincided with the peak economic power of the U.S. globally.

What did happen was that masses of people threw off their superstitious awe of the state and seized the political initiative away from the ruling class. People labeled the police as pigs. Soldiers in Vietnam refused to obey orders and rolled hand grenades into the tents of officers who were too gung-ho. Students burned down dozens of ROTC buildings. Women flat-out rejected the institutions of patriarchy. There were massive urban revolts in the U.S. and a growing Black liberation movement. The state had lost legitimacy in the eyes of millions.

One result was a furious debate within the ruling class over how to handle the situation and regain control. Should there be a repressive clamp-down or should people be bought off with temporary concessions? The intensity of the struggle eventually led to a situation where both the president and vice president were forced to resign and the country had a president and a vice president who were appointed, not elected. That's what a crisis in the ruling class can look like. (For light entertainment, I recommend people read former Vice President Spiro Agnew's memoir Go Quietly... or Else.)

The second requirement of a revolutionary situation is a revolutionary-minded people. They don’t have to be a majority, but they do have to be a significant force. In the ’60s there was a great awakening to the reality that the “American Dream” was actually an American nightmare for so many people here and around the world. While there was no deep understanding of what an actual revolution would require, literally millions of people came to believe that the existing system was hopelessly flawed and what was required was a “revolution.” Far from being a social stigma, there was a great deal of approbation for people who called themselves revolutionaries.

People also began to act on their new self-identity. It was immoral to remain a passive observer. Demonstrations in Washington became so militant that the Nixon administration took to surrounding the White House with a wall of buses for fear that people would storm the seat of executive power. The call to shut Washington down in May of 1971 resulted in such an outpouring that the Army was called in to defend the capital and over 12,000 people were arrested—the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

But while we at least had a start on the first two requirements of a revolutionary situation, what we did not have was the third ingredient: a revolutionary party with the determination, the understanding, the plan, the leadership, the organization among the people, and the program for a post-revolutionary society that could both galvanize and lead a successful seizure of power. Even the most advanced force in that time, the Black Panther Party, never sat down and seriously addressed the question of what it would take to actually overthrow the state and lead a new revolutionary society.

2. THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Few people today are familiar with even the outlines of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), and it is probably the single most lied about event in world history. It was an amazing ten-year mass upsurge in China led by Mao Zedong to break the power of the entrenched revisionist “communists” who wanted to follow the path of the Soviet Union, a path that would—and ultimately did—lead to the restoration of capitalism. 

It was my privilege to have visited China twice during the latter half of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. As with the sixties, my understanding of what happened in this momentous world event comes more from study after the fact and from the insights of others, than from my own personal observations. That said, it was still amazing to see with my own eyes!

While books and films on the GPCR correctly focus on the demonstrations, mass meetings and “big character posters” that were at the heart of the struggle for power, one aspect of the GPCR that is little recognized is that it produced the most massive political education program in human history. At each point, the entire country was mobilized to read and discuss the same major theoretical work. When I was there in 1972, people were studying Anti-Dühring by Engels and in 1975 it was Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program. At one point I kind of naively asked if they really had enough copies of Anti-Dühring for everyone to read. I was told in a rather matter-of-fact way that the state publishing house had just run off another 50 million copies. Now that's taking study seriously!

Another often forgotten aspect of the GPCR that impressed me so much were the “socialist new things.” I wrote about these at the time. These were experiments from below in forging new social and economic relations at a local level that presaged what a future communist society might look like. There were places where local communities consciously turned what had been commodities into social services. The use of these services was no longer linked to or exchanged for money earned by the recipients of those services. People used what they needed and contributed to the common weal in other ways. 

In 1972, I visited a small village near the Daqing oil field in Manchuria. In this village, the women all worked—but in different sectors of the socialist economy. Some women worked in the fields as part of the local agricultural commune. They were paid mostly “in kind” from the crops. Some other women worked in a small local co-op factory that manufactured tacks. These women were paid from the money received from selling their tacks to the state. Finally, some women had jobs in the oil field and were paid cash wages directly by the state.

The interesting fact here is that all the women worked hard, yet they received quite different incomes that were based on the differing economic productivity of their labor. The women who worked in the fields had the lowest income. The women from the tack factory were in the middle. The women who worked in the oil field made the most, because the productivity of the state-owned oil field was the highest.

The women in the village were all involved in studying Marx and they were wrestling with a theoretical question: They understood why some of them made more money than others. But did it have to stay this way? They didn’t think so. So, they decided to pool their incomes from the three different sources and divide the money more evenly. This was a startling break with the laws of exchange in a market-based economy. It was, in fact, revolutionary! It was a step toward communism, made by people consciously breaking with the concepts of “cash value” and private ownership as natural and inevitable.

In the end, the socialist transition to communism was defeated in both the Soviet Union and in China; capitalism was restored. “Living labor” was once again subordinated to “dead labor” (capital as accumulated labor). The slogan “Serve the People” was replaced with the slogan “To get rich is glorious.” The great lessons learned under the leadership of Mao were that the revolutionary seizure of power is only the beginning, not the final goal, and that you cannot “produce your way to communism” by increasing the level of material abundance. The period of socialist transition is much more characterized by intense class struggle over changing economic and social relations that requires a leading core that is consciously striving for a classless society. 

3. THE BIRTH OF THE NEW COMMUNISM OF BOB AVAKIAN

The most important and lasting thing to come from the sixties is the new communism of Bob Avakian. Avakian is the architect of a new framework for human emancipation and is, without question, the Karl Marx of our time.

The defeat of socialism in the Soviet Union and China presented a big issue to “sixties people.” But Avakian refused to accept the triumphalist conclusions of the propagandists for capitalism. He has now spent over 50 years investigating what actually happened and has upheld the tremendous achievements of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. But he then dug into not only what was done right, but why mistakes (some of them quite grave) were made. With what method and approach did the leaders of these revolutionary societies address the freedoms and necessities they confronted? And how might we today do it differently and far better?

I will try to lay out what I see as some of Avakian’s important conclusions and insights, but no one should take my observations as “authoritative” and they certainly do not replace the need to actually read Avakian’s basic works.

What Avakian highlights is the failure to be thoroughly scientific; scientific meaning to bring one’s ideas into correlation with reality and not wishful thinking. Too often, 20th century communism (the “old communism”) fell into an almost religious approach, substituting belief for reality. One striking example was the teleological claim that communism is inevitable. Communism is NOT inevitable; it is possible, there is a material basis for it, but it is not inevitable.

I think what has impressed me the most in Avakian’s work is his new conception of socialism. Too many people today think of a socialist state as one with a “mixed economy” in which capitalism is restrained by the power of representative democracy while the state guarantees a basic standard of living and medical care for all.

By contrast, Avakian has built on Marx’s concept of socialism as a period of transition in which the class dictatorship of the capitalist class is replaced by the class dictatorship of propertyless working people and their allies. The conscious goals of this transition are an economy governed by social needs rather than by a commodity market, and an end to the necessity for one section of society to hold institutionalized power over the rest.

Another way of characterizing these goals was stated by Marx:  the abolition of all class distinctions, of all the production relations on which those class distinctions rest, of all the social relations that correspond to those production relations, and the revolutionizing of all the ideas that correspond to those social relations.

But a barrier to masses of people taking up this understanding was the too frequent suppression of critical thinking by the old communism. In contrast, Avakian calls for a socialist society with room to disagree and “air” for people to breathe. While maintaining socialist state power against any violent attempts to restore capitalism, the new socialist state is best characterized as having a solid core with a lot of elasticity. Communists should never fear the truth and should encourage dissent, because all truths can be learned from.

Avakian points out that contradictions can arise between the people and a socialist state. While the socialist state has to protect the people from external enemies and any forceful restoration of capitalism, the socialist state also has to protect the rights of the people from the state itself. Of particular importance is Avakian’s insistence that communists lead the state mainly through ideological and political influence and not through organizational control. Members of the communist party must be subordinate to the law and the constitution of the socialist state, and are afforded no special privileges by virtue of being members of the party. 

In particular, Avakian calls not only for the right of people to criticize the state and even call for the restoration of capitalism, but further, the state should in part fund such criticism and also fund the legal defense of persons prosecuted by the state to the same extent that the state funds their prosecution. This is a concept of legal rights that no capitalist state has ever dared espouse.

Avakian has also sharply criticized the ideas that truth has a class basis (rather than truth being objective) and that working and oppressed people have a special purchase on truth simply by virtue of being exploited or oppressed. From this flowed the faulty idea that just putting working people in positions of power, rather than fighting for all of society to have a deeper understanding of the path to classless society, would solve the problems.

Another example of faulty analysis in the old communism is the idea that the basis for communism is material abundance, from which flowed the idea that a socialist state could just “produce its way to communism.” There is a certain required level of abundance to have a communist economy, but the principal necessity is the change in people’s thinking and social relations—not how much material wealth there is to go around.

The old communism also did not always do well with issues of internationalism. The goal of communist revolution is not the improvement of the lives of the people in a given country, but rather the global emancipation of humanity from the fetters of capital. As Avakian points out, the principal task of a communist country is to serve as a base area for world revolution. Yet too often communist leaders succumbed to nationalism and concentrated on the interests of their own country.

Plus, there was a serious failure in the moral underpinnings for communism and the road to get there. The new communism of Bob Avakian is firm in holding that the ends do not justify the means. Crimes cannot be committed on the grounds that they will get us closer to communism. Rather, communist means must always flow from and be consistent with the goals of communism.

Like Marx, Avakian has been a prolific commentator on current events and has provided invaluable guidance. In particular, he has over the last forty years documented and warned of the rise of Christian nationalism and fascism in this country. (Here, see Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025.) People in Germany might have had the excuse that “no one could have seen what was coming.” People in this country cannot claim that excuse.

At the same time, Avakian has looked much more deeply into the path for revolution in developed capitalist countries, and the deadly pull on even the best-intentioned people toward overestimating the strength of necessity and underestimating the freedom that exists to transform that necessity—ultimately leading them to either denying the possibility of, or just sitting and waiting for, a revolution. Instead, what is required is an active analysis of the fault lines of the existing society and constant straining at the limits of the possible with a concrete goal in mind:  the hastening of a revolutionary situation.

It is important to understand that the body of work that Avakian has created is not an add-on, a refinement, or a particular application of Marxism. Rather it is a qualitative leap in the science itself, comparable to the leap made by Marx. At the time of Marx, capitalism had consolidated state power in America and the major states of Europe, and was spreading across the globe like a metastatic cancer. Humanity had nothing to confront it with save bourgeois democracy, syndicalism, or utopian concepts of socialism, often based in religion. Marx changed all that with a scientific explanation of the capitalist system and what had to be done to abolish it. 

Today, with the defeat of the great revolutions of the 20th century, the globalization of capitalist production, the existential climate threat to the planet, and the world-wide spread of fascist movements, the old tools of bourgeois liberalism, social-democratic labor movements, and even the best of past communist thought, have been shown to be utterly inadequate to the challenges facing humanity. It is at this point that Bob Avakian has stepped forward to address what has to be done, but with a qualitatively transformed and more scientific, evidence-based method and approach. Avakian has given humanity the tools for its next great leap.

Like Marx in his time, Avakian is a controversial figure. Marx was considered something of a dogmatist and sectarian by the reformists of his day. To get a feel for this, people should watch Raoul Peck’s film The Young Karl Marx. Yet like other great scientists before and after him, the insights of Marx have proven basically true and have come to both shape our understanding of the real world and alter the course of history.

Having been witness to this development over many years now, I can say that if you are serious about emancipating humanity then you have to become a student of Bob Avakian. I have to admit that as a student of Avakian, I was often late for class and didn't always make good grades. But I never dropped out of school. Young revolutionaries today have the most advanced revolutionary thought in the world in their hands with their whole lifetimes ahead—and I still have another 15 years. Together, let's run with it!

There is much, much more, but I would encourage people to dig into Avakian’s many written works such as The New Communism, the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, and Breakthroughs.

Codicil

In December 2020 at the height of the COVID crisis in New York City, I was living a few blocks from a major hospital in Brooklyn. Outside the front of that hospital, lines formed daily of people waiting to be seen in the emergency room. Around back, behind the hospital, there was a row of refrigerator trucks for the bodies for which there was no longer room in the hospital’s morgue. 

While that pandemic crisis has abated for now, the global warming crisis has not. We are now pretty much past the point of no return. For about three billion years, plants, algae and cyanobacteria have been patiently extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using solar energy to synthesize carbohydrates, and releasing oxygen back into the atmosphere. In the last three hundred years, that whole process has been dramatically reversed, with the burning of fossil fuels releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere in massive quantities, trapping solar radiation in the form of heat. 

Today, almost everything that moves in commerce (trucks, planes, trains) moves on energy released from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, petroleum and natural gas). Yet at the same time, the amount of energy that falls on the earth from solar radiation is more than enough to meet humanity’s foreseeable needs. So what prevents simply switching to solar energy in place of fossil fuels? The capitalism system.

Many trillions of dollars of capital are invested in both fossil fuel powered equipment and in the extraction and distribution of fossil fuels. To abandon that, would require the literal destruction of all that capital. The owners of capital have zero incentive to eat that massive loss, and they have the powerful compulsion from competing capital to continue with what they are doing. Only a new communist revolution can change this and put humanity first. This is a basic reality, yet most people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an end to capitalism.

Interrelated with the climate crisis is the destruction of the viability of life for millions of people in their home countries. One result has been the mass migration of people from the global South toward white, imperial Europe and America. The year that I was born, 1940, was the “high water mark” for white people in America. Whites made up 90 percent of the population. Today, whites make up 60 percent of the population, and an even smaller percentage of school-age children. 

That demographic change in the U.S., combined with the decline of U.S. economic power in the face of global competition and the impact of the movements of women and people of color, has provided the basis for a core of reactionary capitalists to organize a fascist movement. A movement appealing to the preservation of the economic well-being and social superiority to which white, male, Christian Americans feel entitled. Hence the emergence of a fascist movement to “Make America Great Again.”

The horrors that consolidated fascism will wreak on this country and the world are beyond the imagination of most people. Trump must be driven from power NOW, before it is too late.

To make revolution, you need three conditions. In the words of Bob Avakian (BA), the first one is this:

A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the “usual way of things,” that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the “normal” way that people have been conditioned to accept.

Every week, the Trump fascist regime drives this first condition further. And this past week the regime and Trump himself took further big leaps in moving to subvert what is considered one of the main ways that "people have been conditioned to accept" the oppressive and exploitative rule of American capitalism-imperialism: the U.S. elections. 

These fascists deeply and fanatically believe that only they are the legitimate rulers of this system and they are actively working to rig and steal the next election—without violence if they can, but through violence if they must. What is urgently required are millions of people determined to wrench a livable future for humanity out of this extremely volatile and dangerous situation.

Election Rigging, Violent Threats and Practice Runs

Since Trump was prevented from stealing the 2020 election—despite an all-sided campaign which did actually come very close to succeeding—he and those around him have been actively working to steal the next election. On Trump's first day in office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 insurrectionists who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overturn the 2020 election. In August 2025, Trump asked fascist governors to redraw election maps to openly favor the fascists. He has worked to remake how American elections are run and has repeatedly threatened to run for a third term.

This has intensified over the last two weeks:

This week, Trump has repeatedly threatened a federal takeover of elections. This would be a major violation and break with the U.S. Constitution itself, which says that the states oversee the elections. 

Twice he has said that "The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And he even went so far as to spell out what kind of places needed to be “taken over,” naming Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta as incapable of conducting fair elections because they are all “unbelievably corrupt.” These are all majority Black and Latino, and majority Democratic cities. 

On February 3, the fascist architect and ideologue Steve Bannon said, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” And addressing Democrats, he said, “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

A leap in this offensive took place on January 28 when the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 elections.¹ In the midst of this raid, Trump himself got on speakerphone with the FBI agents to ask questions and praise them for being part of this outrageous raid. This kind of direct intervention from the fascist commander-in-chief is unprecedented.

Analyzing what was really going on with this, Marc Elias—an elections lawyer for the Democrats—said: 

This is not only the election denialism of 2020... this is about proof of concept for the future. People talk about seizing ballots and surrounding polling places and stealing elections as if somehow these things are easily done. These are conceptual frameworks that people in the administration have to get comfortable with, moral frameworks they have to get comfortable with. They have to contend with the Constitution and the law and judges and all that, but they also have to contend with just the sheer logistics of it all. Like, how do we actually do this thing where there are ballots in the possession of a county official? How are we going to get them and how are we going to then count them in a way that is going to cast doubt on the outcome or cast doubt on the outcome through other propaganda and disinformation campaigns? And I think that this Georgia thing is just as much about that as it is about 2020. And in that respect, we have to be honest: Donald Trump and his administration are pulling something off. They actually did seize ballots. They actually got their hands on them... at the end of the day, Tulsi Gabbard is on a truck full of documents that have been seized from an [election] office. And those are now in the possession of Trump's FBI...

One of Trump's regrets from 2020 is that he didn't seize the voting machines, and in a recent interview, he openly pondered whether National Guard troops were “sophisticated enough” to impound ballots in the upcoming election. 

As a vicious climax to the week, Trump posted an ugly racist attack of Barack and Michelle Obama—depicting them as apes—in the midst of a video lying about the "stolen 2020 election." And in all these attacks, there is a vicious and openly white supremacist assault against voting rights for Black people and Latinos. 

All this is happening in a context in which court rulings that go against the Trump regime are routinely ignored, and in the great majority of cases that get to the fascist dominated Supreme Court, the Court rules in favor of Trump. 

Elections: Why They Mean Nothing… 

What we've cited here just scratches the surface of an onslaught of lawsuits, proposed legislation, blackmail and other maneuvers by the fascists to make sure that Republicans either “win” the election (by preventing people who oppose them from voting, or from having their votes counted), and/or are in a good position to overturn the election results if the fascists lose. 

This whole situation is politically explosive. Millions are actively opposing this regime in every corner of society. Trump's armed gestapo is murdering protesters without remorse. Meanwhile, Trump is itching to send the U.S. military into city streets and continues to threaten to execute his political rivals. 

In a country that has relied on the "peaceful transfer of power" as one of the central things that provides this system with legitimacy, openly ripping that away is not a minor matter. We'll speak to this point more below, but first, let's get clear on what elections are, and are not.

Despite the cover of "freedom and democracy," elections have never been the process through which decisions in this system of capitalism-imperialism get made. But they have been at the foundation of why people go along with this system. You're constantly told that if you passionately oppose the white supremacy and patriarchal oppression of women and LGBT people, if you can’t stomach the mass deportations and wars, if you dread the ongoing destruction of the environment… then you should vote for someone to change all this. But because all this oppression is woven into this system of capitalism and cannot be ended under this system, there can be no real meaningful change brought about through elections.

The elections do, however, give this system a so-called "popular mandate." They tell you that the elections express “the will of the people.” But the reality is that who you vote for and the questions you hear debated are pre-selected to serve the interests of that same system. You don't change or "control" this system through the elections, but the elections is how you get controlled, confined and channeled—in your thinking, and actions. 

Just think about the election of 2024 where you could not meaningfully vote against the genocide in Gaza. Because as profound as the differences are between the Democrats and the Republi-fascists, they do have a fundamental unity about the need for their empire (again, even as they have sharp irreconcilable differences over how this empire should be ruled). And whatever else is going on, the American empire needs Israel to play a role as attack dog and military outpost in the strategic region of the Middle East.

...And Why (Sometimes) They Could Mean a Lot

But now that con game is in a crisis.

The Republi-fascists existentially feel that they cannot preserve the American empire without a sharp break with the "normal" way that U.S. capitalism has functioned for the last 150 years and are determined to smash that whole way of operating. These dangerous maniacs fervently believe that only they, and only their program of open and unconstrained white supremacy, male supremacy, erasure of LGBT people, hatred of immigrants, anti-science lunacy, belligerent war mongering, the crushing of protest and dissent, and decimation of the rule of law—only that recasting of U.S. society is legitimate and can “Make America Great Again.” And the path to achieving this demands defeating, crushing and subordinating—as violently as necessary—their opponents, both in the ruling class and among the people. Elections also have to be “retooled” (assuming they are continued) into an automatic affirmation of fascist rule. (See sidebar for more from Bob Avakian on the roots of this.) 

In the election of 2020, Bob Avakian called Trump's attempts to steal that election a "rolling coup." The culmination of this all-sided effort was on January 6, 2021 when thousands of crazed fascists violently stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the vote. When it was over, BA labeled it a dress rehearsal.

This time, the fascists are determined to succeed.

This Situation Demands That YOU—That Every Decent Human Being—Step Up Their Commitment to Stop This and Search for a Way Forward Out of This Truly Existential Crisis

No one can predict exactly how this situation will unfold in these next weeks and months—the situation in the U.S., and around the world is extremely volatile. But Trump/MAGA fascism is accelerating, and working overtime to lock down their grip on society and consolidate their fascist program.

What we can predict is that those who are ignoring or downplaying this danger are marching you to disaster. The Democratic Party and their leading representatives are desperately clinging to the very elections that the fascists are moving to rig and steal. As a ruling class institution, they are working to maintain the stability of capitalism-imperialism and will not risk the upheaval that might be required to defeat Trump fascism. Elias himself, while sounding the alarm that Trump's moves are "terrifying," ended up just arguing that what people should do is protest, keep filing lawsuits, "make a plan to vote, pay attention, and make sure that everyone in your social circles understands what's going on."

In the face of this fascist warp-speed juggernaut, this is extremely inadequate and profoundly irresponsible. If this regime is allowed to consolidate, it will not just mean absolute horror for masses of people here and all over the world, it could crush any real possibility of resistance, or the struggle for a better future. With the increased danger of climate catastrophe and nuclear war, it's not an overstatement to say that it could even mean the extinction of our species.

There need to be growing millions recognizing the full fascist program, in sustained nonviolent protest, determined to drive this whole fascist regime from power NOW! People's rights—including their basic right to vote—need to be defended as part of going up against and defeating this juggernaut as a whole. And people broadly need to have each other's backs in the face of the severe repression being brought down by the fascist regime. 

At the same time, there is great urgency in looking deeper into the very system that has given rise to this fascism, and so many other atrocities, and in looking for answers outside of and beyond this system. For while the situation is full of extreme and very negative danger, there is also the possibility that a revolution to bring a whole new system into being could be wrenched out of all this craziness if through this, the second two conditions for revolution are developed. Again, from Bob Avakian:

A revolutionary people in the millions and millions, with their “allegiance” to this system broken, and their determination to fight for a more just society greater than their fear of the violent repression of this system....

An organized revolutionary force—made up of continually growing numbers of people, from among the most oppressed but also from many other parts of society—a force which is grounded in, and is working systematically to apply, the most scientific approach to building for and then carrying out revolution, and which is increasingly looked to by masses of people to lead them to bring about the radical change that is urgently needed.

That radical change is spelled out in an inspiring way in the Declaration from the revcoms, We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System:

So long as we are still living under the rule of this system of capitalism-imperialism, we will defend people against attacks on their lives and on the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. But we need a whole different system, with a whole different Constitution—the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America—which will provide much greater rights for the people, including the basic right to have the fundamentally determining role in a new society and government whose purpose and goal is to eliminate all exploitation and oppression, everywhere.

The fact is that, despite its claims to speak in the name of “we, the people” the U.S. Constitution is a document that was written by and has served the interests of slave-owning and capitalist exploiters, from the beginning of this country down to today. It is a document that restricts the notion of “freedom” to what is possible within the killing confines of this system of capitalism-imperialism, a system of brutal exploitation and murderous oppression. It is a document that sets the terms for enforcing this system which treats the masses of people, here and all over the world, as objects to be used and abused to generate profits and increase capital for a small number of big-time exploiters...a system that casts off as useless, and treats as dangerous, huge numbers of human beings who cannot be profitably exploited...a system that causes endless wars that kill off millions and cause massive destruction...a system that treats the environment as something to be plundered in the pursuit of profit and rivalry to dominate the world.

The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America is completely, fundamentally different than the U.S. Constitution. This Constitution for a new socialist republic provides a sweeping vision, a firm foundation and concrete blueprint for bringing into being a society, and ultimately a world, free from all forms of slavery, all exploitation and oppression based on class, race, sex and gender, all relations in which one part of humanity is subordinated to and dominated by others.

The new socialist system based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America will do what can never be done under this system of capitalism-imperialism: Through its institutions, through elections and in an all-round way, this new socialist system will provide the means to politically empower the masses of people, in order to carry out the revolutionary transformation of society, and to contribute to this process in the world as a whole.

While uniting all who can be united to defeat this fascism, this is what people need to raise their sights to—and be part of fighting for.

Last week Donald Trump posted a social media video of Barack and Michele Obama so ugly and blatantly Nazi in its racism that it even sparked a few hypocritical denunciations from fellow Republi-fascists and assorted Black bootlickers. 

In short, Trump depicted them as apes. This is the type of vile shit that the Nazis pounded out about the Jews—dehumanization to prepare people to carry out genocide. 

This came at the end of the video repeating Trump’s lunatic lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, which itself came on top of a frenzied week of setting things up to rig the 2026 congressional elections. 

Make no mistake. This was a calculated signal to the hard-core lynch-mob racists that “their time is coming—again.” And this kind of shit has deep roots in this country—go here, here and here on revcom.us to learn about literal massacres carried out against Black people merely for attempting to vote. 

To be clear, Barack Obama was and is a champion of this capitalist-imperialist system. Barack Obama emphasized in 2016, after Trump won the presidency, that he and Trump were on “the same team.” Obama himself was more than willing to enforce the racism baked into this system, no matter who is in charge, adding his own perverse specialties of lecturing Black college students to pull up their pants and calling those Black youth who bravely rebelled after the police murder of Freddie Gray “thugs.”  

The fact is that now that “team” has split apart, with one side determined to bring the other under its thumb by any means necessary and to institute outright fascist rule to maintain this system. And as for the masses of people, including (and especially) the masses of Black and other oppressed people? Trump’s message is loud and clear: “if I can come after Obama, I can certainly come after you!"

The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) has sounded the alarm on Trump for years. In 2020, he made clear that Trump's genocidal racism is serious:

Genocide means killing off a whole people, or a large part of that people. Genocide is what the Europeans did to the native peoples in America, while stealing their land. Genocide is Hitler and the NAZIs murdering six million Jews. Donald Trump is a genocidal racist.

Donald Trump hates Black people and everybody who is not a “white, English-speaking, Christian American.” If he could, he would kill off a whole lot of them, and put many of the rest in jail for life, or drive them out of the country.

In an important social media message last fall, BA made the truly crucial point that the “oppression of Black people would exist even if Trump weren’t in power—because this oppression is built into this system of capitalism-imperialism.” BA went on to say something even more relevant now than it was at the time he wrote it, in light of the intensifying situation:

What all this shows is not that all the struggle against this oppression didn’t accomplish anything. What it powerfully demonstrates is that the whole system has to go: Only through a revolution to put an end to this whole system, and bring into being a fundamentally different, emancipating system, can this oppression—and all oppression—be finally and completely ended. But allowing the Trump regime to carry out its horrific program will only make all this much worse, and make the necessary revolution much more difficult to carry out. On the other hand, defeating this fascism, through massive, non-violent but determined and sustained mobilization—uniting all who can be united against this Trump fascist regime, moving to create the conditions where this regime will be removed from power—this can strike a huge blow against oppression overall, and it can also make a big contribution to creating more favorable conditions for the all the way liberating revolution that is needed.

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA!

THIS WHOLE SYSTEM IS ROTTEN AND ILLEGITIMATE! WE NEED AND WE DEMAND A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM, A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE!

Over 60 people gathered in Revolution Books in Harlem on Tuesday, February 3 to have their sights and spirits lifted.  The event was Dreams in Dark Times: A Benefit for The Bob Avakian Institute at Revolution Books, with the prominent jazz musicians William Parker and Matthew Shipp.

The audience was diverse including fans of the musicians who'd never heard of Bob Avakian to Revolution Books regulars.  As people came in, they were given more information about The Bob Avakian Institute and a complimentary copy of a biography of Bob Avakian: a revolutionary leader and thinker, and architect of the new communism.

Through the night, people were taken on a journey—confronting the dark times and led to grapple with what's possible, in an open and inviting atmosphere.

Andy Zee, spokesperson for Revolution Books, gave a powerful introduction to the night.

The musicians then played a deep and resonant set.  One attendee said afterwards, "I don't know what was on the minds of the artists as they performed, but I thought I could hear darkness and the striving for something different, the creative impulse to break the bounds of what has been." 

In between sets, the audience heard again from Bob Avakian answering the question posed by Sunsara Taylor in an interview last year, "If we had a time machine and we could just fast forward into the future into a revolutionary society, how would things be different? What would it look like? What would it feel like?" 

Annie Day, the Director of The Bob Avakian Institute, followed this up.  She talked about the world historic significance of Avakian's work and the mission of The Institute in a moment of profound stakes for humanity, and yet widespread hopelessness.  She called for people there to make a financial contribution to The Institute.  And to volunteer their time to be part of changing what people throughout society are debating and discussing.  The Institute aims to host forums and classes, and work to spread Avakian's work throughout society.  The broad engagement with Avakian's pathbreaking work can have a profound positive impact right now -- breaking people's thinking beyond the soul-crushing and people destroying confines of capitalism. 

After a second beautiful and dynamic set, William and Matthew shared their perspectives about why they wanted to be part of a benefit for The Bob Avakian Institute.  After the event, Revolution Books was abuzz.  There was a feeling of seriousness and joy.

As Annie made clear, this was the first of what The Institute hopes will be more such events. 

You can donate to The Bob Avakian Institute here, and sign up to volunteer here.  Please send your ideas, suggestions and questions to info@TheBobAvakianInstitute.org

In addition to our appreciation for the artists, we want to thank the volunteers who were essential in making this event happen, and to the staff of Revolution Books for your generous participation.

Note: The videos on this page are rough cut videos. A short video of the program will be available in the near future. 

New York Times opinion writer David French began a recent column (“This Is Not a Drill,” February 1) with: “It’s only February, and the November elections are already in peril.” He asks readers to imagine the scene in this country a few days before the November mid-terms: word of ICE carrying out operations near polling stations cause many voters to stay away… citizens with Latin-, African- or Asian-sounding names are purged from voter rolls… the FBI raids state election offices, and Republican officials take over running of elections in some Democrat-led cities, based on Trump’s accusations about “fraudulent elections”… and more. As French rightly notes, nothing about this all-too-real scenario on the elections is “far-fetched,” and some of it is already happening. 

But in the second paragraph of his column, French goes way off track on facts when he writes: “When I think back to the days and weeks before Jan. 6, 2021, one thing that’s clear is that many of us suffered from a failure of imagination. We knew President Trump’s lies and conspiracy mongering were dangerous, but it’s hard to think of a single person who predicted that a MAGA mob would storm the Capitol.”

Not “a single person”? Definitely not true! Revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) clearly warned that Trump was not going to accept a defeat and could mobilize MAGA mobs to try to overturn election results. Take, for example, this from a September 2020 article by BA:

Another thing that must not be forgotten is that Trump has not only justified and supported but openly encouraged violence by armed white supremacist storm troopers (what he calls “Second Amendment people”). He has supported police violently attacking protesters and utilized armed forces of the government to attack and suppress protests, in Washington, D.C., in Portland and other cities. There is already plenty of evidence—and more evidence comes out all the time—that (assuming the election is actually held) regardless of the actual outcome of the election, Trump will declare himself the winner and use whatever means he can, including violence, to stay in power.

As BA noted, various “fanatical backers of this regime, in and out of government, have called on its supporters to arm themselves in preparation for the election.” And, very importantly: “It would be a very grave mistake to fail to take seriously what is being openly proclaimed by Trump and his fascist supporters.” BA didn’t “predict” the exact form this would take—the storming of the Capitol by Trump’s fascist mob on January 6—but the coup attempt was precisely the kind of thing BA was warning about when he said Trump would “use whatever means he can, including violence, to stay in power.”

If this prescient alarm were pointed out to French, he might (lamely) say, “I never heard of Bob Avakian…” Well, that is a big problem—it is unacceptable that supposedly “knowledgeable” people like French and others opposed to Trump are ignorant of, or even consciously turn away from, the work that BA has done, and continues to do, over many decades on fascism (see “Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025”), let alone attempting to bring about an emancipating society. 

As for his work analyzing the source of and sounding the alarm on fascism, BA noted last fall:

Over the past 30 years, I have analyzed how the Republican Party has been moving in a fascist direction since the 1960s, with further leaps since then to becoming more and more openly fascist. And now, with the “second coming” of the Trump regime, this fascism is on an unrestrained rampage.

It would have been far better—we would very possibly not be faced with the terrible situation we are now forced to confront—if this analysis, sounding the alarm about very real fascism, had not been so often ignored, or met with stubborn resistance and cheap accusations of being dishonestly “alarmist.” In a number of critical situations over the past decades, those of us who have recognized this developing fascism for what it is, have called for massive mobilization to defeat it—but, although some responded to this call, the millions who should have taken it up did not do so. So, now, here we are. And, while we should not “live” in the past, we definitely should learn from it. 
(From social media message REVOLUTION #141—“The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime!”)

Along with sounding the alarm, BA has deeply and repeatedly gone into how this fascism emerged out of the history of this country and the system of capitalism-imperialism that rules over us—as he says, there is a “direct line” from the Confederacy to the Trump/MAGA fascists. Over the past 30 years, he has scientifically analyzed the trajectory of this fascism. As Lenin once said, "Miraculous prophecy is a fairy tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact.”

And Avakian has done much more. He has laid bare—both on a high theoretical level as well as with penetrating exposures—how this entire system, whether in its normal “democratic face” or now in its openly fascist one has, by its very nature, led to horror after horror for people here and around the world… and how only an actual revolution can lead to finally ending the immense and needless suffering caused by this system. He has shown that we are now in a rare time when revolution in this country, the most powerful and destructive empire in history, is more possible. And he is the author of the Constitution for a New Socialist Republic in North America, a sweeping vision, firm foundation, and concrete plan for a radically different and much better system—one, incidentally, with far greater provision for dissent and far stronger protection of the rights of the individual than the U.S. Constitution.

The world is at a crossroads—humanity is face-to-face with existential dangers of global climate catastrophe and increasing threat of all-out nuclear war… even as the new communism brought forward by Bob Avakian has opened up a whole new framework for human emancipation. The hour is late—it is way past time for all those agonizing about where humanity is headed to have the integrity and courage to look into Bob Avakian’s work with open hearts and minds.

As we write, the grave danger of war looms over the Middle East. The fascist Trump regime is once again threatening to launch a war on Iran. Such an illegitimate, imperialist act of aggression threatens the lives of many thousands, perhaps millions, if it spreads across the region, and perhaps beyond.

This past week, Trump warned that a U.S. armada was heading toward Iran, prepared to carry out military strikes “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose,” if Iran’s Islamic Republic didn’t bow down to Trump’s nakedly imperialist demands for submission. 

Trump’s demands? A permanent end to all nuclear enrichment (which Iran has the right to do¹); limits on the range and numbers of Iran’s ballistic missiles; and an end to all support for Iran’s allies across the region. In other words, Iran is to be left defenseless while the U.S. and Israel, with their massive stockpiles of nuclear bombs and other weapons of war, and military bases and alliances across the region, would have free rein to attack Iran and others in the region whenever they decide to.   

“Time is running out,” to accept these outrageous demands, Trump warned, “it is truly of the essence!”

The U.S. has surged military forces into the region, including the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group,² combat ships and destroyers, at least a dozen attack aircraft, and anti-missile systems. Long-range U.S.-based bombers can attack Iran, and the U.S. has between 30,000 and 40,000 troops already stationed in the region.

Meanwhile, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Republic has threatened to launch a regional war if the U.S. attacks.

The situation is extremely fraught and quickly developing. There are reports that the U.S. and Iran are now negotiating and may avoid war. Other reports claim the U.S. has already decided on war. 

Oppose Fascist Trump’s Imperialist Bullying and War Moves

Revcom.us will continue to follow this perilous situation and keep readers informed. But right now several key things are very clear:

1. These threats and any attack on Iran by the fascist Trump regime are completely outrageous and illegitimate. They are not being done in support of the Iranian people’s just struggle against the Islamic Republic, or to end the danger of nuclear war, just the opposite: they’re being done to more forcefully impose U.S. imperialist domination, including military domination, on Iran and its people and the entire Middle East region.
2. The people of this country have a responsibility to the people of Iran and the world to vigorously oppose any and all aggression, bullying, and military attacks on Iran.
3. The U.S. imperialists are the world’s “top predators.” But Iran’s theocratic rulers are also thoroughly reactionary: they are part of the global capitalist-imperialist system, and have just slaughtered thousands of Iranians who rose up for justice in early January. The rebellions of the Iranian people over the last period—over the severe economic privation in these past weeks, and especially in 2022 around the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” are overwhelmingly progressive and should be supported.
   Now is not the time to choose between oppressors. People in this country also have the responsibility of supporting the just struggle of the Iranian people, against their hated rulers, for justice and a brighter future. In this light, see Intervew with Osyan³ on the January Uprising in Iran, and War Has Casualties?! from Atash/Fire, journal of the Communist Party of Iran, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.

The criminal and very dangerous threats by U.S. imperialism and the fascist Trump regime, as well as the crimes of Iran’s Islamic Republic, once again emphasize the urgency of the call from the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, Bob Avakian:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.

No U.S.-Israeli Attack on Iran!

Support the Just Struggle of the Iranian People! 

In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!

This whole system is rotten and illegitimate! We need and we demand: a whole new way to live, a fundamentally different system!

But the slaughter of our people had other international partners as well. In this massacre, the security services of the Islamic Republic of Iran benefited from the obvious and unprecedented cooperation of the Russian and Chinese security services. These facts must be highlighted when preparing an indictment for the massacre of people during the January 2026 uprising by the armed forces of the IRI (including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards [IRGC], the Basij [its civilian militia], and its international branch, the Quds Force). The participation of Israel, China, and Russia in this massacre should be exposed and protested on a worldwide scale.

With this introduction, we will discuss the suppression of the January 2026 uprising. What we know so far is this: thousands of people were killed across the country, more than 100,000 people were injured, people's neighborhoods were destroyed, the wounded were kidnapped from hospitals and killed, and medical centers were turned into centers of murder.

After the June 2025 military attack on Iran by U.S. and Israeli forces, the Fars News Agency (which is close to the IRGC) wrote: “Why shouldn't we repeat the experience and the executions of 1988? Don't you think the time has now come to repeat that successful experience… which helped us to run the country for years without any problems and not have to deal with the problem of terrorism.... If we rid ourselves of our enemies in just the same way that we got rid our enemies in 1988, we can feel secure.”⁵

This shows that the IRI had been preparing to commit this crime. The arrests and executions that followed [the June military attack], and the October 2025 “Enhanced Punishment for Espionage” law, promulgated by [Iran’s President Masoud] Pezeshkian, indicate that they were preparing to commit a major crime.

The Doctrine and the Structure of Repression, in Generic Terms

Now let's turn to the doctrine and structure of repression in the IRI. Everyone knows that in the IRI, the security and survival of this regime determine its policies. From the IRI's perspective, protest is an on-going feature of Iranian society, not an occasional occurrence. Therefore, they have adopted a model of continuous repression. The model of continuous repression is built into the identity of the IRI. This is the general characteristic of the IRI's security doctrine. However, it is specifically designed to suppress urban youth. Statistics on the victims of the January 2017 and November 2019 uprisings, the [2022] Mahsa “Jina” Amini uprising, and the January 2026 uprising, clearly demonstrate this reality.

The model of repression in Iran is a hybrid of Chinese and Russian [imperialists] methods combined with local structures and practices. Of course, because the repressive apparatus of the IRI is heir to the organized repression apparatus of the [Mohammad Pahlavi] Shah's regime, it is not without the influence of certain Western [imperialists] methods of repression. But the hard core of the IRI’s current suppression doctrine is indebted to the Chinese and Russian methods of suppression.

The IRI has adopted China’s so-called “Strike Hard” doctrine. “Strike Hard” is a structural policy to exert tight control over society. It operates on the basis of fear, speed and intensity of the action, and control over the narrative. The key principle of “Strike Hard” in relation to large protests is to stop the protesters by administering a severe shock. Implementation of “Strike Hard” includes mass executions and, in street operations, the use of military-grade weapons, indiscriminate and coordinated killings in multiple cities, attacks on hospitals, and mass arrests.

The IRI's model of repression borrows from Russia its use of asymmetric violence, and shadow-operations, and terror-inducing tactics. Russia's pattern of repression in Africa (especially by the private Wagner forces controlled by the Russian government) is recognized as among the most violent and brutal models of “population control and political suppression.” Asymmetric violence reacts to any instance of “violence” or self-defense by the people with exponentially greater violence and terror-producing operations. [The late IRGC Commander] Qasem Soleimani⁶ both learned from the “Wagner model” and used it in his suppression of  the people of Syria.

This model includes severe repression and mass killings, targeted shootings of civilians, “cleansing” operations in protest areas, the use of heavy weapons of war, disappearances, executions at close range, and the dissemination of fabricated narratives to justify the crackdown. The goal is: “deterrence through fear.”

The IRI retained some of the methods of repression used by SAVAK [Shah’s secret police] and in 1979-1980, combined them with [Aytollah] Khomeini's idea of forming a “20-million-strong army,” which resulted in the creation of a vast network of Basij forces in the neighborhoods, schools, factories, and offices. It is a local, cheap, and decentralized security force network that enforces theocratic control throughout the country. The Basij has a huge budget, and is constantly recruiting from both cities and rural villages.

Conclusion

Our Party has always grappled with the issue of the IRI “model of survival,” and has grappled with how to develop a systematic method of confronting it, based on a precise knowledge of the repressive apparatus, its doctrine and methods of operation, and to transfer this understanding to the youth who step into the arena of struggle against the regime. In the face of repression, the question is always: what can we do to turn the repression used on us back against itself—and to mobilize the people to wage the struggle on an even larger scale. At its core, the answer to this question is political and ideological line. Attention to technical and tactical principles is subordinate to that. In this regard, the document titled “Accumulating Forces and Organizing for Revolution” (an excerpt from the documents of the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Iran, MLM) says:

So far we have encountered great obstacles along our way, and will do so again. … On this path, we must maintain our strategic nerve. During storms, heavy blows, and setbacks, we must keep our heads above water, not lose our sense of direction, and not give in to “it cannot be done,” “we’ll be isolated,” and “why didn’t we take such and such a step earlier.”

We can maintain this basic orientation, not through sheer willpower, but by using the scientific method of seeking to understand the problems and search for solutions. In other words, political struggle with a correct orientation is the decisive factor in confronting the repressive apparatus and transforming each act of repression into a broader and more enduring struggle against the IRI. Even now, in light of the repression of the January 2026 uprising, we must once again examine the structure of the power that we are going up against, and the factors that strengthen it or lend it resilience.

Since the U.S.-Israeli military aggression in June 2025, the IRI has increasingly tied its fate to the intense rivalry between the Chinese and Russian imperialists and U.S. imperialism. In exchange for this loyalty, China and Russia helped rebuild the IRI's military and security apparatus. At the same time, in response to public unrest and uprisings, the IRI adopted the approach that “public dissatisfaction equals continuation of the 12-day war,” and began preparing for the massacre. The infiltration of Israel's proxy forces into the people's uprising gave the IRI an opportunity to declare war on the uprising of the unarmed people, and with the pretext of “we are at war, and the enemy has infiltrated,” was able to unite internal factions of the government and even to bring along a number of religious intellectuals, reformists, and national-religious figures.

This analysis tells us that we must strongly oppose any policy that seeks to drag the popular uprisings into imperialist contention. When the many women and men fighters grasp the complexities of the political scene, and the character and objectives of the various forces involved in it, then they can prevent others from following the worthless orders of the fascist Trump, the Mossad security apparatus, and their hired broker, Reza Pahlavi. 

The significance of having the theory and policies to confront repression is as significant as having a theory and policy to confront the regime's theocratic religiosity, its attempt to squash freedom, its mandatory hijab and its enforcement of national oppression, its reactionary regional wars, and so on.

Now, a major and decisive battleground with the Islamic Republic of Iran is to turn the regime’s repression from a tool of its survival into a driving force for its overthrow. 

Success in this difficult arena requires creating and strengthening a powerful movement with two simultaneous characteristics: it must have the ability to actively and effectively resist severe suffocation by the widely deployed domestic repression machine, and at the same time it must keep the tentacles of scavengers dependent on Israel and the U.S. away from the people and prevent the toxic polarization of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Success in this struggle depends on thousands of young people—who rose up and put their lives on the line in these uprisings—developing a revolutionary method and approach. They must have a clear understanding of who are the friends and the enemies of the revolution. They should not only be against the IRI but they must also stand against U.S. imperialism and the imperialists of China and Russia who support the IRI—and support the struggle of people in those countries to overthrow their governments.

The prerequisite for turning repression back against itself requires that a broader movement grasp these political lessons, and that they become widespread among the people. This political factor is crucial to further isolate the IRI both domestically and internationally. Without this revolutionary orientation, we will not succeed in creating the broadest popular alliance within the country, nor in gaining the support of the people around the world. This policy must be reflected in the people’s slogans. The slogan that must resonate and appear on doors and walls everywhere is: Down with the Islamic Republic of Iran—Long Live the New Socialist Republic in Iran.

The message of the Sarbedarans is this: To end the one-sided war being waged by Islamic Republic, or any similar regime that may replace these fascists, the people need their own revolutionary army. The people will fight against their conditions of oppression and exploitation; they will sacrifice their lives, multiplying and spreading courage. The point is that all of this must find a political focal point, with a clear program and a strategy for realizing that program, so that we can turn repeated historic defeats into victories—the victories for the “New Socialist Republic [of Iran]”—because, this is the only alternative that can truly free our society from the grip of centuries of oppression and exploitation in both old and new forms, and inspire humanity in every corner of the world.

Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)

The article in this month's Rolling Stone, "The Anti-Fascist Group Fighting Trump—And Some Critics on the Left," by David Peisner is a lazy and dishonest distortion of the work of Bob Avakian, the revolutionary leader and architect of the new communism.

Relying on unthinking anti-communism, it serves as a justification for ignoring the challenge in Avakian's work to confront what we are facing with Trump/MAGA fascism, to seriously examine the fact that this fascism has its roots in U.S. capitalism-imperialism, and to act commensurate with the urgent dangers we face. This includes being willing to have your fundamental assumptions challenged and your sights raised beyond this horrific system. Instead, Peisner disguises intellectual cowardice as "reportage": go nowhere near Avakian's work and do not work with the revolutionaries who advocate for this work—if you do you will be deemed ineffectual and sidelined.

With the future hanging in the balance amidst accelerating fascism, climate catastrophe, genocide and the danger of nuclear war, no one should accept this cynical dismissal of the most burning questions confronting humanity: whether a radically different, and far better, society is possible. This is what Bob Avakian's work concentrates, and why it demands serious engagement.

Peisner's article is supposed to be about Refuse Fascism, an organization begun in 2016 with the demand: In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America! As their website says, they are "on a mission to unite all who can be united into the largest nonviolent mass mobilization in U.S. history to drive out the Trump Fascist Regime—a regime that threatens humanity’s very future." The real message of Peisner's article is that, while there may be good-hearted people with Refuse Fascism, they cannot succeed because there are people within it who base themselves on the new communism developed by Avakian. 

But after 3,000 words, you are left utterly ignorant of the substance of this. While Peisner mentions Bob Avakian's name 30 times, he says nothing about the content of BA's work. He says that Avakian has been sounding the alarm about the rise of fascism in the U.S. for 30 years but is completely lacking in curiosity as to why Avakian has been so far-sighted and prescient or what the content of this analysis is. The fact is that Avakian's work on fascism has been way ahead of the curve, and humanity would be in a far better situation if people had not ignored and dismissed these warnings the way Peisner does, but had actually listened and acted on Avakian's analysis—years ago! 

Since 1996, Avakian has dug into how the economic and social changes within the U.S. and internationally have given rise to a Christian fascist program among a section of the rulers who feel this represents the only way to rescue their system. In 2017, while people were still befuddled as to why Christian fascists would find a partner in Trump, Avakian spoke to "the unholy alliance" Trump made with these Christian fascists. Avakian has, since 2016 warned against all those who have underestimated and normalized Trump/MAGA fascism. He's dug into the coherence of this fascist ideology in the triad of white supremacy, patriarchy and a belligerent America-first chauvinism—all of which are rooted in the American Confederacy. As such, Avakian recognizes that the social base for this fascism is not a product of "economic grievance," but those who find their interests in defending all this oppression. Avakian has taken on the illusions that you can rely on the Democratic Party, or normal channels of this same system, to defeat fascism. He recognizes that while individual Democratic Party politicians may play a role in standing up against this fascism, the Democratic Party as an institution cannot fight this fascism the way it needs to be fought. While fascism is rapidly accelerating, these are life and death questions around which Peisner is utterly silent. 

Even more, the prospects of a revolution and radically different system are completely written off in Peisner's view. He says that the "The RCP claims Avakian has synthesized a new, more scientific version of communism that represents nothing less than a 'whole new framework for human emancipation'... The issue some on the far left have with Avakian isn’t so much his ideas or motives, which overlap those of many communist organizations, but rather the way the RevComs deify him."

The fact is that those who take issue with Avakian do so exactly because of "his ideas and motives." Avakian is working on what would be required to make an actual revolution to end oppression and exploitation. The people Peisner quotes are working on building movements of opposition that do not step outside of, or fundamentally challenge, the confines of this system. Instead of making a substantive argument, they just use the magic word "cult" to shut down any serious debate.

In a social media message last year titled "Mindless Anti-Communism and Mindless Accusations of 'Cult': Brainwashing to Shut Down Critical Thinking and Fundamental Opposition to this Monstrous System" Avakian talked about the way the movements in the 1960s challenged the widespread anti-communism which is akin to the accusations of cult. "Today, along with the continuing slander and ideological assault against communism, there is this other form of brainwashing, which is perpetrated not just by traditional representatives of the ruling class but also by various opportunist forces which claim to be 'woke' or 'progressive,' or 'socialist,' but which do not seek solutions that actually break through and beyond the confines of this system and do not offer any really emancipating alternative."

The heart of Peisner's argument for how revcoms "deify" Avakian is the fact that "The party’s website calls Avakian 'the most important political thinker and leader in the world today,' and declares that 'being a communist today means following Bob Avakian and the new path he has forged.'" These statements are either true or false. A reply from the revcoms to another crude attack on Avakian by Hannah Zeavin spoke to exactly this same idiotic argument:

Clearly, what is involved in these statements has to do with matters of great, indeed of world historic, importance: would any serious and decent person deny that it is of world historic importance whether “a whole new framework for human emancipation” has actually been developed? Flowing from that, whether these statements regarding BA are true, or not, is itself of very great significance. The fact is that BA has actually developed a whole new framework for human emancipation. But to judge whether that is true, or not, requires first of all caring about human emancipation; and it requires some work, in order to have the basis to make a rational judgment about this. Assuming that (despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary) Zeavin actually recognizes the importance of intellectual integrity, the only honest answer she could give to the question of whether these statements about BA are true, or not, is: “I don’t know. I cannot say, because I have not done the work to have the necessary basis to evaluate this. But I am going to seriously look into this, because of its objective importance.”

While Peisner notes that Avakian is "a prolific writer, publishing more than a dozen books," he also says that Avakian is "enigmatic." This would be laughable if the idiocy weren't so harmful: if you wanted this alleged "mystery" solved, you'd have to open one of those dozen books or read his work or watch interviews or listen to his social media messages—all of which are readily available, and all of which Peisner studiously ignores!

As to the content of the new communism that Avakian has developed, C. Clark Kissinger, a longtime activist and revolutionary recently wrote the following:

It is important to understand that the body of work that Avakian has created is not an add-on, a refinement, or a particular application of Marxism. Rather it is a qualitative leap in the science itself, comparable to the leap made by Marx. At the time of Marx, capitalism had consolidated state power in America and the major states of Europe, and was spreading across the globe like a metastatic cancer. Humanity had nothing to confront it with save bourgeois democracy, syndicalism, or utopian concepts of socialism, often based in religion. Marx changed all that with a scientific explanation of the capitalist system and what had to be done to abolish it.

Today, with the defeat of the great revolutions of the 20th century, the globalization of capitalist production, the existential climate threat to the planet, and the world-wide spread of fascist movements, the old tools of bourgeois liberalism, social-democratic labor movements, and even the best of past communist thought, have been shown to be utterly inadequate to the challenges facing humanity. It is at this point that Bob Avakian has stepped forward to address what has to be done, but with a qualitatively transformed and more scientific, evidence-based method and approach. Avakian has given humanity the tools for its next great leap.

The fact that the editors of Rolling Stone chose to publish this kind of vacuous garbage about something so significant is irresponsible and an indictment of a culture that skims on the surface, profoundly lacking in critical thinking and rigor. 

For those who care about the extreme injustice being brought down on people here and all over the world: our heating planet, genocide and war, our neighbors kidnapped, the rule of law shredded, protest criminalized... for those who refuse to give in to the hopelessness and complicity and want to know whether a radically different future is possible, don't listen to the cynical naysayers and upholders of the status quo, have the courage and integrity to look into Bob Avakian's work for yourself.

If it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, brothers and sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here, it’s now. It’s in my city. It’s in your city, and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, denounced, ousted, overthrown, and driven out!

— Tom Morello, benefit concert in Minneapolis, January 30, 2026

The most important aspect of [a recent anti-ICE] protest was the “elephant in the room.” An endless line of speakers went on for close to 2 hours in the freezing cold. They came from different points of view and had different particular focuses. But the one thing they shared in common was that none of them ever mentioned the need to drive out the fascist Trump regime… Speakers from different trends/organizations called out things that people hate …But not a word about driving out Trump before it is too late. Yet a huge percentage of the people there knew that is what it will take…

— Refuse Fascism activist, January 31, 2026

Remove the Dictator Now!

— Statement on a protest sign at an Alex Pretti vigil, February 1, 2026

Refuse Fascism has been ready for years to meet this moment—but have its ties to a former 1960s radical become an albatross hampering its ambitious agenda?

— Rolling Stone, January 26, 2026

Two Slogans Richly Borne Out

There’s more than a little dark irony in Rolling Stone’s recent, largely negative, Bob Avakian-bashing piece on Refuse Fascism (RF), the organization that has stood out for nine-plus years for its dead-on understanding of and militant opposition to Donald Trump, Trumpism, and the Trump regime(s)⁹. Titled “The Antifascist Group Fighting Trump — and Some Critics on the Left,” the article was published just as terrible events in Minnesota including the extra-judicial execution of two peaceful protesters by Trump’s masked “immigration enforcement” gendarmes made it yet more undeniably clear that RF’s core slogans are well-matched to the current American and world historical moment:

· “In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!”

· “The Trump fascist regime must go now!”

Nobody serious at this point can honestly deny that Trump, Trumpism, and the Trump47 regime fit RF’s definition of fascism:

“Fascism is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this has taken dramatic leaps under the Trump MAGA regimes. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. No matter how it comes to power, fascism is never legitimate. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

Trump’s first horrific year back in power demonstrates the correctness of two key points RF has been making since the orange-brushed ogre returned to power:

· Nothing remotely like decency and fairness from the US government can arise without the removal of the fascist Trump regime.

· Trying to wait out the Trump47 fascist regime and defeat it through coming rigged elections amounts to morally irresponsible advance capitulation to horrors inflicted at an ever-accelerating pace. (Even assuming — perhaps I should say imagining — non-rigged elections in 2026 and 2028, the very notion of letting the supremely destructive eco-fascist Trump-Miller-Vance-Hegseth-Rubio regime hold power until January 20, 2029, or even for another year is sheer madness.)

Do you want “ICE [Mein Trumpf’s national Gestapo and/or SS] Out of Everywhere” (a welcome slogan I have seen on protest signs across the country in recent weeks), not just out of your own community? Do you stand against white supremacy? Do you oppose criminal attacks on other countries and support the international rule of law? Do you want to save livable ecology? Defend LGBT folks’ humanity? Want free and fair elections, basic constitutional rights, an independent media, respect for science, education, critical thinking, cultural freedom, truth, and basic human decency? Recognize and support women’s humanity and equality? Support the rights of asylum and flight from desperate poverty and violence across borders? Want a future worth living in?

If you align with decent humanity by answering in the affirmative to these questions then you need to understand that the Trump regime must go and it must go NOW, before it’s too late. This is a fascist regime atop the American ship of state bidding to remake American government and society along fascist — meaning genocidally racist + militantly patriarchal + xenophobic nationalist + Christian fundamentalist + arch authoritarian and indeed dictatorial — lines. As Tom Morello said during his benefit concert in Minneapolis six days ago:

“My friends, if it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, brothers and sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here, it’s now. It’s in my city. It’s in your city, and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, denounced, ousted, overthrown, and driven out!”

Bad Counsel to a Heart Attack Victim

It’s negligent and even reckless to tell people to wait for future elections the Trump fascist regime has no intention of letting take place in a free and fair fashion, or of honoring if Trump doesn’t like the outcomes. It’s like instructing someone in the middle of a heart attack to take two aspirin and make sure to go to their regular scheduled check up with a really bad doctor — the dismal Democratic “inauthentic opposition” Party of Hollow Resistance in this analogy — who is himself very ill and who may well be dead nine and thirty three months out. Only a mass, determined, and sustained popular front movement determined to “unite all who can be united from many different viewpoints and perspectives” (the language of RF’s March 2025 Call to Conscience, Call to Action) around the demand that the Trump fascist regime be removed from power immediately can meet the moment. This is what RF has consistently called for and worked to being into being.

“The Elephant in the Room”

That — the Trump regime OUT NOW — is precisely the essential core demand that is missing in the righteous and inspiring anti-ICE protests that have sprung up across the country in response to the extrajudicial executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. It’s the “elephant in the room” at these protests, this even as many who attend these welcome events know very

The following brilliant report on one of these protests from an RF activist in a major US city resonates perfectly with what I have seen and heard across the US Midwest since Trump came back to power:

“In reflecting on our experience there, our team generally agreed that the most important (but not necessarily self-evident) aspect of this event was the huge ‘elephant in the room.’ There was an endless line of speakers who went on for close to 2 hours in the freezing cold. They came from different points of view and had different particular focuses. But the one thing they shared in common was that none of them ever mentioned the need to drive out the fascist Trump regime. To a large degree this got over with the crowd (which was loudly supportive) because the speakers spoke to them in a variety of ways. They were very angry and militant — ‘Fuck Ice,’ ‘Drive Out Ice,’ ‘Shut Shit Down,’ ‘We need a General Strike.’ Many also spoke with a lot of heart about the solidarity they felt with immigrants. Speakers from different trends/organizations also called out things that people hate — racism, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on people’s living standards, the insane amount spent on ‘defense’ as compared to education… But not a word about driving out Trump before it is too late. Yet a huge percentage of the people there knew that is what it will take to get rid of ICE and seriously challenge all the other horrors that were being spoken to. The reason we know this was in people’s minds is because that was the message we took to them with our banner, our materials and our interactions with them. IF you want to get rid of ICE, Trump Must Go Now! And we got nothing but agreement, often very strong agreement.”

This is precisely my experience in a bright “blue” (Democratic Party-voting) university town where protest speakers remain stuck in electoral quicksand while politely dissenting from various Trump outrages but never calling for the fascist regime’s immediate removal. This elephantine silence on the speakers’ platforms persists even as people in the crowds below acknowledge (often in hushed tones) that Trump’s immediate removal is “what it will take to get rid of ICE and seriously challenge all the other horrors.” One of those people at a polite campus town vigil at a giant Veterans Administration hospital gave me this homemade sign while the liberal speakers advocated calm, peace, voting for (unmentionably dismal Weimar-like) Dems, and respect for collective bargaining rights:

Essential Contributions from a Demonized “Cult Leader”

How and why has RF been able to get it right from the start, unlike any other “Left” organization in the country except for the Revolutionary Communist Party (the RCP)? A big part of the answer is that RF’s leadership has prominently included RCP (“Revcom”) leaders who have long followed the talks and writings of the brilliant revolutionary communist theorist and strategist Bob Avakian. Avakian is a prolific historical and dialectical materialist who has been arguing for three decades that American capitalism (capitalism-imperialism in RCP language) and its attendant oppression structures and ideologies of bourgeois class rule, white supremacism, patriarchy, xenophobic nationalism and Christian fundamentalism were interacting with each other and with changes in the world capitalist system in such a way as to breed a US-American version of fascism — no small problem atop the most lethal imperial superpower in history in a time of climate catastrophe and a world chock full of nuclear weapons! By Avakian’s “scientific” analysis, with which I agree, this US Amerikaner fascism poses a grave existential menace not just to previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law “democracy” and to social and political gains won by past American people’s movements, but to humanity itself.

Avakian’s warnings and the analysis behind them have been thoroughly born out during the first and second Trump presidencies and during the pathetic, fascism-enabling Biden interregnum. Like the Obama presidencies, the Biden White House was a perfect match for Avakian and the Revcoms’ understanding (and my own understanding developed well before I ever read a word by Avakian) of the Democratic Party as hopelessly captive to US capitalism and imperialism in ways that make it incapable of fighting fascism the way it needs to be fought.

It’s not too much to say that RF has stood in the moral and intellectual vanguard of the struggle against Trumpism-fascism largely because of Avakian’s intellectual work. The person Peisner calls “an albatross” around RF, Avakian, is the main reason that RF has, through the influence of its openly RCP-affiliated co-founders and leaders, “been ready for years to meet this moment” — far more ready than any other group in the US other than the RCP itself.

It’s not just that Avakian’s distinctive understanding of how the underlying oppression systems that shape America and the world have produced the monstrous Trump fascist regime. It’s also about Avakian’s consistent and penetrating critique of what passes for a Left in the US and indeed around the world — a “Left” that has failed to “meet this moment” because of its many decidedly un- and anti-revolutionary afflictions, including deadly over-attachments to: crippling subjectivist identity politics, the deadly “quicksand” of ballot-fetishizing electoral politics, reductionist and imperially parasitic economism, outworn prole fetishism, ubiquitous incremental reformism, excessive localism, mutual-aid-ism, anti-statism, anti-vanguardism, individualism, spontaneitism, anti-intellectualism, academic careerism, and more. These disorders, to which the Revcoms are more inoculated than any other radical group thanks to Avakian’s long intellectual toil, have produced a “radical left” that has often been shockingly incapable of grasping:

· The fascist essence of Trumpism and the core historical and material ingredients of the Amerikaner fascist mix concentrated in the Trump movement and party. 

· The Trump47 administration as a fascist regime imminently threatening to impose a new form of dictatorial governance. 

· The urgent need for a mass and sustained peoples’ uprising to force the removal of the Trump regime before it cements fascist rule atop world history’s most dangerous and lethal superpower — and before the damage it inflicts on the world is irreversible. 

I have for years been struck by the remarkable inability and dogged refusal of even certain avowedly Marxist organizations of the sort that one regularly sees at protests to acknowledge the very basic fact, now more obvious than ever, that the Trump regime is fascist. Activists from two of these groups (both of which I will leave unnamed in the interest of popular front unity) have absurdly told me that peoples’ ability to stand together at a protest without being slaughtered en masse by the government was proof that it is not yet appropriate to use the F-word! They argue that you shouldn’t say fascism until fascism has fully consolidated lethal state power to the point where all protest is drowned in blood. This absurd head-in-the-sand position informs their creepy insistence on opposing “the Trump agenda” without calling for the end of the Trump regime itself. 

Which brings to mind another medical analogy. Anyone who tells you we aren’t really dealing with fascism because the regime isn’t mowing us all down in the streets is like someone telling you that you don’t have throat cancer until a malignant tumor in your neck prevents you from swallowing and speaking.

And, oh, by the way, 40-plus people have died in ICE detention since Trump came back to power and the last year, and the Trump regime just carried out two public extrajudicial executions of protesters in Minneapolis. Like Morello says: “if it kills like fascism…”

After Trump

It’s not just about how to understand and fight the Trump regime, it’s also about what comes after the removal of that regime. If Avakian is right, and all the intellectual and political work I’ve done over the last three decades tells me he is, fascism cannot be swept into the dustbin of history unless and until humanity rises up to carry out an actual socialist revolution designed to create a world beyond all oppression and exploitation — towards a communist future in which the reigning maxim is “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

RF’s “Ambitious Agenda”

“Refuse Fascism,” the opening blurb atop Rolling Stone’s article reads, “has been ready for years to meet this moment — but have its ties to a former 1960s radical become an albatross hampering its ambitious agenda?” (emphasis added) 

Beneath the faint if deserved praise, this is an odd statement. The 1960s ended 56 years ago, on January 1, 1970, meaning that anyone who was a radical during the 1960s is “a former 1960s radical.” Avakian is still alive, thinking and writing at a good pace, making him an ongoing 2020s radical, not a wax museum character from another century (though I’m sure his many haters/“critics…on the left” would embrace that image).

RF’s “ambitious agenda?” Try instead “Refuse Fascism’s urgent and selfless call for masses and organizations to rise up before it’s too late against a fascist regime that threatens all prospects for a decent human future?” 

Rolling Stone fails here to ask why this hasn’t become the “ambitious agenda” of other liberal, progressive, and left organizations, as is urgently required?

Avakian Derangement Syndrome (ADS)

“There isn’t another organization [other than the RCP, that is],” the Revcom and RF leader Andy Zee told David Peisner, “that has the analysis that this is a fascist regime, it’s consolidating very rapidly, that you can’t count on the normal processes of how this country is governed to redress this. Avakian made that analysis. There wouldn’t have been a Refuse Fascism without that analysis.”

That’s an accurate and suggestive observation, worthy of follow-up, given Peisner’s acknowledgement that RF “has been ready for years to meet this moment” (unlike any left, liberal or progressive group, Peisner fails to note), no?

Not for Peisner. Instead of digging into Avakian’s writing and talks on these topics, something that seems required for a responsible report on his subject, Peisner spoke to marginal US lefties who told the journalist that the RCP is nothing more than a “cult of personality” around Avakian — and that RF should therefore be dismissed. And instead of engaging the troubling topic of why the non- and anti-Avakian US “Left” (few of whose adherents could tell you a single substantive and serious thing about Avakian’s writings and talks) has failed “to meet this [fascist] moment,” Peisner is content to quote failing and anonymous (except for an unknown “Marxist” named Max Elbaum) “Left” activists on why the RCP and therefore RF supposedly suck.

This raises a question for Rolling Stone: might it be that part of what is “hampering” the struggle against Trumpism-fascism is some of “the Left’s” curiously anti-intellectual posture¹⁰ toward a leading communist thinker who has run — written and spoken — circles around any other radical thinker on what we are really up against and what it will take to defeat it? We might think of this as a form of anti-communist “Avakian Derangement Syndrome” (ADS), a condition that would have a less lethal impact if there was a single other radical thinker anywhere close to Avakian when it comes to breaking down the current historical moment and what is to be done to meet that moment. No such intellectual has shown their face to date, reflecting a great moral and intellectual vacuum on “the Left.”

Translation 

Throughout most of his article, Peisner purports to stay neutral, seemingly content to let “Left critics” do the Revcom- and Avakian-, and RF-bashing. Here is an exception to that:

“Refuse Fascism has sometimes been portrayed as part of a bait-and-switch being pulled on Trump-hating progressives to lure them into the cult of Bob¹¹. It’s not that. The Refuse Fascism organizers I meet are sincere in their desperation to oust Trump. Those who are RevComs mostly come off as smart, well-meaning, and sensible, as long as they’re not talking about Avakian.”

It was decent of Peisner to acknowledge the sincerity of RF activists’ desire to remove Trump, but here is a useful translation of the last sentence in that passage: “The Revcoms in RF don’t actually talk all that much about Avakian because they know that liberal anti-communist journalists like me and much of what passes for a US ‘Left’ have sticks up our asses about Bob Avakian even though we know next to nothing about his work. I pressed Revcom-affiliated RF activists with questions about Avakian and they responded by saying things that came off to me as dumb, ill-intentioned, and silly. This is because I have been programmed by ruling class ideology to think of revolutionary communism as foolish, bad, and senseless.”

That programming strikes me as an albatross wrapped around Peisner’s mind.

Curious and Creepy Timing

What is David Peisner’s “ambitious agenda”? At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, there’s something unnerving about the timing of the liberal and left attacks that have been launched against Revcom activists who have dared to play leadership roles in US social and political movements. Three and a half years ago, liberal and leftish abortion rights groups undertook a malevolent and slanderous neo-McCarthyite assault on Rise of 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) because one of RU4AR’s three founders was the brilliant revolutionary communist and open “follower of Bob Avakian” Sunsara Taylor The attack was launched right after the Supreme Court’s horrific female-enslaving Dobbs decision was handed down without facing serious and sustained mass resistance from the liberal Democratic women’s and pro-choice “movement.” It came just as the correctness and righteousness of RU4AR’s position, highly critical of the cringing surrender advanced by the Planned Parenthood establishment, was being demonstrated. The timing of this vicious, COINTELPRO-like campaign against RU4AR was certainly about more than coincidence.

Last fall, the liberal-leftish “Veterans Against Fascism” leader and social media “influencer” Kristofer Goldsmith launched a malicious and mendacious neo-McCarthyite online (Substack and Instagram) attack on RF. Goldsmith accused RF of being nothing more than the tool of a nefarious Avakian “cult”³ seeking to take over the minds of decent anti-Trump activists, like something out of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The timing of Goldsmith’s creepy online strike was less than random. It was launched as thousands converged in Washington DC on November 22nd to call and lobby for Trump’s impeachment at a “Remove the [Trump] Regime” rally linked to a free anti-Trump concert featuring a popular progressive folk-rock group (the Dropkick Murphys). The rally came in the wake of RF’s success in bringing thousands to DC on November 5 demanding Trump Out Now. Like its June 14 rally in DC, RF’s November 5 action captured mainstream media attention, including a favorable reference on MSNBC’s (now MS NOW's) influential Rachel Maddow Show.

Goldsmith’s unprincipled smear of RF reflected his determination to keep anti-Trump sentiments safely and dysfunctionally channeled into establishment institutions by inoculating masses arriving for “Remove the Regime” from RF’s essential understanding that the Trump regime must be brought down through mass action now, not after mid-term or presidential elections that:

• are too far in the future considering the incredible and potentially irreversible damage the Trump47 regime does every single day and hour.
• the Trump regime is ready, willing, able, and already moving to subvert.
• the Trump regime will not honor if they don’t go its way.

Peisner’s Rolling Stone article is based mainly on in-person research he undertook in Washington DC nearly three months ago. Why did it just appear now, just as the regime’s terror in Minnesota has masses of people there cheering Tom Morello after the rocker says, “it’s fucking fascism…here… now….in my city…in your city, and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, denounced, ousted, overthrown, and driven out”? As my leftish friend “Bumps” Willard likes to say, “think about it.” Do such moments call for certain semi-influential liberals and progressives like Goldsmith and Peisner to do the work of the right by working to demean and marginalize those who would rally the people for a struggle commensurate to the fascist menace we face?

Are the Goldsmiths and Peisners of the world part of the controlled and inauthentic opposition, tasked with keeping peoples’ movements confined within the limited terms of the nation’s capitalist and imperialist masters, many of whom have now shifted from previously “normal” bourgeois democracy to fascism? I have no X-ray vision into the minds of Peisner and his Rolling Stone editors but it’s hard not to suspect that their article was saved for a moment when events again proved with special forces the correctness of RF’s Avakian-influenced diagnosis and prescription. Do such moments call for good American liberals and progressives to do the work of the right by working to demean and marginalize those who would rally the people for a struggle commensurate to the menace we face?

“Which Side Are You On?”

Which side are Peisner, Rolling Stone’s editors and publisher, and Peisner’s purported RF “critics on the Left” on? Here we are smack dab in the middle of a rolling advanced bid for the fascist takeover and makeover of American government and society along the lines of what Avakian has been warning about (and explaining) for many years, and these ADS purveyors/victims are devoting time and energy to taking down Avakian’s followers in the organization that has done more than any other to “meet the moment” — to struggle to alert the American people to the fascist menace that they and all of humanity face and how to defeat it — thanks in great part to Avakian’s work. Adding to the dark comedy, RF has consistently conducted itself in accord with Avakian’s call for popular front unity and selfless movement solidarity across political and ideological differences — the exact opposite of the snarky divisiveness reflected and advanced in Peisner’s curiously timed report.

Peisner and his editors are free to criticize and reject RF for whatever reasons they like, of course, but their not-so veiled anti-communist attack on RF and the Revcoms raises an interesting question: what other group or groups, if any, do they see as “ready to meet the moment” by addressing “the elephant in the room” — the need to drive out Trump before it is too late”?! RF would I’m sure like to hear from any such organizations. It has never maintained that it can carry out its “ambitious agenda” on its own! It has long called for everyone and anyone who hates what the Trump regime is doing to America and the world to rise up in a great and diverse movement to make America ungovernable by deranged and debased fascist monsters like Trump, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Sam Alito, Pam Bondi, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Mike Johnson, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Joe Lonsdale, Tom Homan, Clarence Thomas, John Thune, Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, and Cory Lewandowski, et al. 

Peisner, Goldsmith, and other liberals and lefties can whine all they want about big bad Bob Avakian, but the raging fascist Trump regime will not be stopped any other way than what Avakian, the Revcoms, and RF say: “Humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for future and rigged elections. We must drive the Trump Fascist Regime from power.”

This year, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, will see an ugly torrent of red-white-and-blue celebrations of America as a “great country”—spearheaded by Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump. This is a celebration of America now led by fascists. But the truth is that America was NEVER “great,” whoever was heading up the government. 

As revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said, if people are stung by that truth about America, they need to look at reality:

This “Republic” to which we are supposed to pledge allegiance was founded on slavery and genocidal robbery: keeping millions of Black people in chains for generations... killing off huge numbers of Native Americans and stealing their land... waging a war that ripped off half of Mexico, greatly expanding slavery.

So, was this a great country all during that time—when millions of people were enslaved—owned by bloodsuckers who constantly whipped the slaves to make them work harder under horrific conditions, slave-owners who raped masses of enslaved women? Was this country great then?!

Was it great when, for generations after slavery was formally ended, Black people as a whole were segregated, discriminated against, and continually terrorized, with repeated massacres of Black people and thousands of Black people lynched? Was it great when, all during that time, LGBT people were “illegal,” when women were legally treated as inferior to men—and men could legally rape their wives? Was it a great country then?!

Or is it great, now, when people are everyday denied basic rights? When the police kill a thousand people every year, especially people of color, and in the 60 years since Civil Rights Acts were passed, segregation and discrimination has remained as bad, or worse, as it ever was, and thousands of Black people have been killed by police—even greater numbers than all those who were lynched during all the years of Ku Klux Klan terror after the Civil War!

Has this country ever been great, when, right from the beginning and down to today, the whole thing has literally been built on the broken bodies, the blood and bones, of millions and now billions of people, worldwide—cruelly exploited, used and abused, by this system—with all this backed up by murder on a massive scale carried out by the police and the armed forces of this country?

No, this country has never been great. It has always been a horror for masses of people. 

(from social media message REVOLUTION #2: When has the U.S. been a “great country”?)

It’s way past time for this system—capitalism-imperialism—that rules in this country, dominates the world and now has spawned fascist rule, to be thoroughly abolished, through an actual revolution.

Below is Part 2 of a series that highlights aspects of how 250 years of America has been nothing but a horror for the masses of people, here and around the world. We begin with a piece on the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew the elected government of Iran and brought in the bloody U.S.-backed regime of the Shah. We call on our readers to send in your contributions to this series—articles, video, audio, artwork, social media posts. Email revolution.reports@yahoo.com or message @therevcoms via social media.

See also Part 1: American Crime Case #98: 1953 CIA Coup in Iran: Torture and Repression–Made in the U.S.A.

Part 2: American Crime Case #12: The 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the Destruction of Black Wall Street

Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907 coincided with the discovery of oil, and the boom years that followed saw its population grow from 10,000 in 1910 to 100,000 a decade later. This included a significant number of Black people, looking for a better life, and hoping to escape the worst of Jim Crow Mississippi, Georgia, and other states of the Old South. In 1921, Tulsa was strictly segregated; Black people could work in town, but all Black residents were required to live and shop in the Greenwood District of Northern Tulsa. In time, Greenwood’s segregated economy, self-contained and self-sufficient, was so successful that it became known nationally as the “Black Wall Street.” About 11,000 Black residents lived in the Greenwood neighborhood. Black-owned grocery stores, banks, libraries, hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and more lined Greenwood Avenue.

THE CRIME

On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner working downtown, entered the elevator of the only building with a restroom Blacks could use in the area. Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old, was the elevator operator. When the door closed, Page cried out, and Rowland ran off. The most common explanation is that Rowland just stepped on Page’s foot. But Rowland was alleged—without evidence—to have assaulted Page. He was arrested the next morning and held in a jail cell above City Hall.

That afternoon, the Tulsa Tribune ran the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” suggesting that Page had been raped, and editorialized: “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” Within an hour of the paper hitting the streets a lynch mob in the hundreds descended on the courthouse.

Word spread throughout Greenwood that whites were storming the courthouse and Rowland was in danger. After debating how to respond, at 9 pm a group of 25 armed Black men, some veterans of World War 1, drove to the courthouse determined to stop the lynching. They got out with their rifles and shotguns, and offered their support to the local authorities. Their offer was refused, and they left.

But the white mob was incensed, and grew into the thousands in no time as word spread, more and more coming with weapons. At 10 pm a group of 75 Black men returned to the courthouse after new rumors that a lynching was imminent. They marched single file to the courthouse steps. Again, their offer of help to protect Rowland was refused. A white man approached an armed Black army veteran and demanded he turn over his gun. A fight broke out, and a gun went off.

Historian and author Scott Ellsworth wrote: “While the first shot fired at the court house may have been unintentional, those that followed were not. Almost immediately, members of the white mob—and possibly some law enforcement officers—opened fire on the African American men, who returned volleys of their own. The initial gunplay lasted only a few seconds, but when it was over, as many as a dozen men, both black and white, lay dead or wounded. Out numbered more than twenty-to-one, the black men began a retreating fight toward the African American district, with armed whites in close pursuit.”¹

“They tried to kill all the black folks they could see,” a survivor, George Monroe, recalled in the 1999 documentary The Night Tulsa Burned.

Shortly after the fighting broke out at the courthouse, a large number of whites—many who’d been part of the lynch mob—gathered outside police headquarters nearby. There, as many as 500 white men and boys were sworn in as “Special Deputies” and told to “Get a gun and get a nigger.” Weapons were passed out by other deputies from a sporting goods store across the street. White rioters began firing on Blacks and setting fire to Black-owned homes and businesses late into the night.

Throughout this assault, Black Tulsans, while tremendously outnumbered, fought back. Riflemen took positions atop the belfry of a newly built church to temporarily halt the advance of the white invasion. But the church was burned to the ground. These attempts at resistance could not be maintained because the deputized police and the National Guard units arrested 6,000 Greenwood residents. Black Tulsans did not go down without a fight, but they were out-gunned and out-numbered. “Survivors recounted black bodies loaded on trains and dumped off bridges into the Arkansas River and, most frequently, tossed into mass graves.”²

By noon on June 1, these white mobs had murdered more than 300 Black Tulsa residents. They had turned 40 square blocks of Greenwood into a scorched wasteland. This included 1,256 homes destroyed, along with virtually every other structure—including churches, schools, businesses, even a hospital and library. “Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level, municipal, county, state, or federal.” (Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921)

After order was restored, the Black people who’d been detained were released, but only if signed for by a white person, who also had to agree to accept responsibility for that detainee’s subsequent behavior. More than 10,000 residents were left homeless. Thousands of Black Tulsans spent the winter living in tents. Many left for good, having had enough of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

THE CRIMINALS

The racist mobs of thousands of white Tulsans were directly responsible for the horror inflicted on the people of Greenwood.

The Tulsa police chief and Tulsa deputies had a direct hand in arming, deputizing, and directing the mobs from the very start of the killing of Black Tulsans.

The Tulsa city officials played a decisive role by refusing to take any action to stop the racial massacre. And shortly afterwards, these same officials passed a zoning ordinance that made it too expensive for the Greenwood residents to rebuild their homes.

The local units of the National Guard, by arresting every Black resident of Tulsa they could find and taking them into “protective custody,” left Greenwood property unprotected and aided the “special deputies” who came to burn it. The after-action reports by the local guardsmen show they saw their job not as protecting the people of Greenwood, but putting down the supposed “Negro uprising.”

The Oklahoma State Troopers did not arrive from Oklahoma City until the annihilation of Greenwood was over; arriving earlier could have prevented some of the worst crimes from taking place.

The governor of Oklahoma, from the very start, treated the events in Tulsa as a Black “insurrection.”

The extent of the Ku Klux Klan’s involvement and possible lead role in this heinous act of terror hasn’t been proved, but “Tulsa’s atmosphere reeked with a Klan-like stench that oozed through the robes of the Hooded Order.” (Tulsa Race Riot report.) At that time many of the city’s most prominent men were Klansmen, including the lawyer assigned to represent Dick Rowland. Photographs of the Tulsa massacre were made into postcards, including a close-up of a charred Black body; and another of the Greenwood District in ruins.

THE ALIBI

The blame for the Tulsa Massacre was, from the very start, fully put on Greenwood’s Black residents—calling it a “Negro Uprising,” or “Insurrection.” A grand jury investigation organized by Oklahoma’s governor in the days after the massacre concluded:

We find that the recent race riot was the direct result of an effort on the part of a certain group of colored men who appeared at the court house on the night of May 31, 1921, for the purpose of protecting one Dick Rowland ...There was no mob spirit among the whites, no talk of lynching and no arms. The assembly was quiet until the arrival of armed Negroes, which precipitated and was the direct cause of the entire affair.

THE REAL MOTIVE

The economic success of the people of Black Tulsa—including home, business, and land ownership—fueled resentment, fear, and jealousy within the white community. Many of Greenwood’s Black residents were living more successful lives than white Tulsans. In a community, and a country, where white supremacy was taken for granted—and counted on—the success of the people of Greenwood was seen as a provocation.

The Tulsa Massacre, and the 1919 “Red Summer” of anti-Black violence that preceded it (see American Crime Case #15), took place at a time when the U.S. rulers needed to maintain the brutal oppression of Black people and white supremacy under changing conditions. The beginning of the Great Migration saw Black people leaving the rural South to find work in the cities of the North. Among them were Black veterans of World War 1, returning with a defiant spirit and less willingness to put up with open Jim Crow degradation and terror. Those in power faced the “need” for Black people to be beaten into submission through terror, their defiant spirit suppressed, and white people (including oppressed white people) enlisted to serve and identify with the exploitative, white supremacist order.

Resources:

• Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the published findings of an independent expert panel on the consequences of the massacre.
• The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims, by B.C. Franklin, an unpublished manuscript written 10 years after the massacre by a witnessing survivor.
• Black Wall Street: The African American Haven That Burned and Then Rose From the Ashes, by Victor Luckerson, a reported, researched look at the glory, razing, and rebuilding of Greenwood.
• Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, by Scott Ellsworth, the first comprehensive history of the events leading up to, during, and after the massacre.
• ‘They was killing black people’, by DeNeen L. Brown, a reported article about the lingering damages of the massacre, and how it affects Tulsa today, Washington Post, September 28, 2019.
• In Search of History—The Night Tulsa Burned, History Channel Documentary

1. “The Tulsa Race Riot,” by Dr. Scott Ellsworth, an essay in Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.  [back]

2. Washington Post, September 18, 2018.  [back]

The Trump regime rode into 2026 on a rampage. From Venezuela to the streets of Minneapolis, the regime murders with impunity and demonizes whole peoples and countries without any pretense of the rule of law.

On January 7, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in cold blood for daring to stand up for her immigrant neighbors. On January 24, CBP agents beat Alex Pretti to the ground and executed him. These are Trump’s Gestapo thugs—unleashed in Minneapolis on a campaign of terror and vengeance. The regime has responded not with accountability, but with lies, justifying murder through the twisted logic that anyone who resists deserves to be shot down.

This is fascism, a different form of brutal rule to enforce white supremacist, patriarchal, and xenophobic oppression and violence. As long as this regime remains in power, this terror will not only continue—it will accelerate. The events of this month—from illegally bombing Venezuela and kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation to murdering civilians in the streets—have brought this home in blood and should dispel any complacency.

This regime will not be bound by any laws or measures of decency that stop them from advancing their aims. They have:

• begun genocidal ethnic cleansing of non-white immigrants, rounded up and sent to concentration camps by lawless masked men;
• unleashed war and terror abroad, while moving aggressively to crush dissent at home;
• branded anti-fascist protesters and political opponents as “domestic terrorists,” laying the groundwork for mass repression.

SHREDDING ANY RULE OF U.S. OR INTERNATIONAL LAW, and getting away with it over and over, is paving the way for horrors that surpass those of the Nazi regime. There is no living with this.

The protests in Minneapolis and across this country have been righteous and inspiring. They must continue—and they must grow. And we must join our righteous fury in the streets with the only demand that truly measures up to the threat this regime poses to all of humanity:

Trump Must Go Now!

No community is safe while the fascist Trump regime controls federal agencies and consolidates power. There is no restraining or abolishing ICE when Trump’s attacks on immigrants are the battering ram and linchpin of his fascist program. To stop ICE terror—and every outrage of the last year—the whole regime must be stopped.

Nothing but massive nonviolent struggle by you, and millions of others like you, can do that. By walking out. By shutting down. By millions rising in massive, unrelenting, nonviolent protest and resistance. By coming back stronger in the face of attack and repression. By uniting, not dividing, across many viewpoints and backgrounds.

We must not wait for future and rigged elections.

The power of the people must drive the Trump Fascist Regime out of power now—before it is too late.

ICE Must Go
The Whole Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now
In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America

We are in the midst of a major fascist leap in the suppression of protest and dissent—but most people don't even know about this. Revcom.us has been reporting on the extreme repressive moves which are otherwise getting very little attention—in the mainstream media or among anti-fascist writers. And this urgently has to change.

This week, we are pulling together a number of these articles and encouraging readers to spread these widely. Grapple together about what is required to combat these fascist repressive moves as part of defeating Trump/MAGA fascism and as part of building up the forces for revolution to bring a radically different, and far better system into being. How do we sound the alarm throughout society? How do we raise standards among the decent people who oppose this fascism? How do we build a movement that has each other's backs?

In a December 15 article on a memo from the fascist Department of Justice, we wrote:

This memo almost certainly foreshadows a major leap in repression. This can neither be brushed off and treated as empty threats, nor can we allow ourselves and all the decent people opposed to this fascism to be preemptively scared into submission. Such moves—if people are mobilized to understand the threat they pose—could politically backfire on the fascists.

But that only happens if consciousness is raised about the real danger of these moves and if standards are adopted in the movement against Trump that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” with individuals and organizations standing with anyone under attack.

In addition to articles from revcom.us, we want to highlight a few other voices sounding the alarm from different perspectives:

Pam Bondi’s Ominous New Memo: “Operationalizing” Trump’s All-Out Fascist Vision, revcom.us, December 15, 2025. 

An overall analysis and dissection of the Justice Department memo issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi, its implications, and what to do in the face of it.

***

Regime Launches “All-of-Government Effort to Dismantle” All Opposition to Fascism, revcom.us, October 20, 2025. 

An overall analysis and dissection of two September executive orders from Trump—one designating “antifa” as a “Domestic Terror Organization,” the other calling for an all-out campaign against political dissent and opposition using the pretext of “domestic terrorism.” 

***

“Don’t Talk”—A Fundamental Principle for Resisting Repression and Defending the Rights of the People, revcom.us, February 10, 2025. 

Essential reading that prepares people to understand and deal with encounters with FBI and other “investigators” being unleashed by the Bondi memo.

***

How Can The President Go After Citizens, Senator Elissa Slotkin, December 17, 2025.

A short YouTube talk on how and why the Bondi Memorandum is another major step in repression.

***

The Bondi Memo’s Quiet Rewriting of Domestic Terrorism Rules, by Thomas E. Brzozowski, Lawfaremedia.org, December 12, 2025.

Brzozowski writes, "If you were not already on high alert, you should be now." Brzozowski is a former Counsel for Domestic Terrorism in the Counterterrorism Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. 

***

U.S. Military Willing to Attack “Designated Terrorist Organizations” Within America, General Says, Nick Turse, The Intercept, December 16, 2025.

Head of the U.S. Northern Command testifies in a Senate hearing that if he was ordered lawfully to deploy troops in cities against “designated terrorist organizations,” he would “execute the order.”

***

FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals, Ken Klippenstein, December 6, 2025.

Klippenstein was the first to report on the Bondi memo. 

***

Did you know that from 1956 to 1971 the FBI conducted a program designed to foment conflict within revolutionary movements, as well as broader movements for reform—conflicts which not only crippled these movements, but served as a cover to carry out frame-ups and even outright murder of revolutionary fighters and activists?

Did you know that they sent undercover people into these movements specifically to create or magnify conflicts? Did you know that they relied on unsubstantiated gossip and often inventions, as well as forged documents as part of their arsenal?

Did you know that they took statements out of context to distort the real views of activists and revolutionary fighters and use these as pretexts for smear campaigns and attempted prosecutions?

All this came to light in 1971, when some brave and heroic people appropriated the files revealing this program in a nighttime operation to go into an FBI office and bring these criminal activities by the government to light. As a result, many people in the movements of the time and even beyond, in broader society, adopted different standards for settling inevitable conflicts over politics and ideology in a principled way, and preventing the police, FBI and other government agencies from spreading slanders, fomenting conflicts and endangering the lives of people active in the struggle for justice.

Now, decades later, a new generation is way too unaware either of the FBI activities or the protocols widely adopted. We saw the results of this in 2022, with the vicious and very dangerous slander campaign that was launched against Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, the revcoms, Bob Avakian and Sunsara Taylor. And now, in light of the heightened repression from Trump fascism and the low standards that exist among people broadly, we are reissuing this article.

We urge people to read and spread the article below, and to insist on principled discussion and debate over disagreements and to oppose any dangerous campaigns of lies, disinformation and distortion.

~~~~~~~~~~~

COINTELPRO was launched by the FBI in secret in 1956 in the context of the rising civil rights movement, and operations were later “signed on” to by the Kennedy administration. Its reach was broad and vicious. The FBI, working in sync with local police “Red Squads” (political police) wrote leaflets fomenting conflicts between different groups. They sent anonymous letters warning parents and school administrators of what their children and students were supposedly doing. They conducted police surveillance and repression against antiwar coffee houses opening near military bases. And those the FBI identified as leaders, in particular, were marked for “neutralization” by the FBI, a euphemism for being framed up on serious criminal charges or killed.

One of the earliest, ugliest and most grievous FBI operations was against Malcolm X. We recently covered this, and we are including it here as a companion to this article.

Going After Martin Luther King Through Personal Slander and Harassment

One element in COINTELPRO attacks on the civil rights movement was the dissemination by the FBI of allegations about Martin Luther King’s sex life that had nothing to do with the struggle for civil rights, or debates within that movement or in society as a whole. The FBI bugged King’s bedroom(!) and then, directly or posing as “concerned individuals” sent supposed taped “evidence” to media outlets and others, including colleges where King was invited to speak, demanding he be disinvited. They even sent such a tape to his wife, Coretta Scott King, in the hope of causing anguish and breaking up the marriage.

The FBI also circulated allegations that King’s movement had organizational and financial connections to communists, playing on anti-communist prejudices, to push (and provide an excuse for) white liberals and what the FBI identified as “the responsible Negro community” to stay away from the civil rights movement at a time when civil rights activists were being brutally attacked and murdered by police and the KKK, and as a cover for massive surveillance of the civil rights movement. Whether or not the authorities were directly involved in King’s murder in Memphis in 1968 as his family and close associates have insisted, the COINTELPRO operation created conditions that facilitated his assassination and was continued for a year after his death.

Going After the Panthers: Fomenting Conflicts to Murder Leadership

A major objective and focus of COINTELPRO was isolating and setting up the most revolutionary forces at the time, especially the Black Panther Party (BPP), for attack. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in a secret memo, wrote to offices calling for “imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.” (Emphasis added.)

As they did with Malcolm X (see the accompanying article), the FBI often focused on setting up others to do the actual dirty work. To take one notorious example, the FBI forged a letter, supposedly from someone in the community, to Jeff Fort, the leader of the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago gang at the time, claiming that the Black Panther Party was getting ready to move on him. In this case, in the climate of the times when there was both a broad culture of being alert to moves by the authorities to forge accusations to set people up, and when there was broad respect for the Panthers and the revolution, Fort decided the threatening letter was not credible. This letter was part of a larger COINTELPRO operation that set into motion events that led to the assassination of Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police and the FBI in 1969.

In another COINTELPRO operation, the LA office of the FBI came up with a plan to forge a letter claiming the US Organization (United Slaves), which had been attacking the Panthers, believed that the BPP had a contract out to kill their leader. The LA FBI office wrote that the objective was for “this counterintelligence measure [to] result in an ‘US’ and BPP vendetta.” The operation was part of what led to the terrible murder of Black Panther leaders John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter by US members in Los Angeles.

Again, there were real issues to resolve, questions to investigate, and debates to struggle out among those struggling for a different and better world in different ways, coming from different outlooks at the time, as now. The pattern and practice of COINTELPRO was to exploit these contradictions to twist them into vicious, destructive personal attacks, with an aim of disintegrating the movements for social change and an edge of isolating and setting up the most radical and revolutionary forces and leaders for what COINTELPRO documents euphemistically referred to as “neutralization.”

Conclusion: don’t fall for—and don’t tolerate—the kinds of behavior that mimic what the FBI has used to destroy social movements. Call it out.

Resources:

The book The COINTELPRO Papers, by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall contains a vast collection of original FBI memos and reports including documentation for the incidents described in this article. It is available as an online PDF.

This article draws on installments of the American Crime series at revcoms.us: American Crime Case #41: COINTELPRO—The FBI Targets the New Left, 1964-1971 and American Crime Case #42: COINTELPRO—The FBI Targets the Black Freedom Struggle, 1956-1971.

An important letter drawing lessons for today from the COINTELPRO operation against Malcolm X: A Reflection on Piggery—Then and Now.

Trump/MAGA fascism is being aggressively imposed on this society in many horrifying ways, instilling fear and a pull towards cooperation with government authorities. One of the ways people are being confronted with this is in situations where people are stopped as they go about their daily business at school, work, or shopping for food and necessities. Right now, that is a living reality for people who are being targeted as “illegal” immigrants, based on how they look or talk. But there are other situations that can be equally frightening: like when someone is arrested at or in connection with a political protest, or when someone is being questioned by police when they don’t have any idea what it is about. In all cases, people need to know what is the best way to respond to prevent these government agencies from doing great harm. 

In the popular culture in movies and TV shows, to the ever-present law-and-order shows of one kind or another, and even the news, all trumpet the same theme: if the police want to talk to you, you are already assumed to be guilty—of something. To exercise one's legal rights is viewed as further evidence of guilt; even the most basic right—getting a lawyer to defend oneself from the legal and illegal onslaught of cops, prosecutors and judges—is depicted with a sneer as "lawyering up," as though this shows you must be guilty or have something to hide. 

Sometimes you hear the police reading what’s called the Miranda warning (see box) to a person they are intending to interrogate, stating that you have the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer. But then everything proceeds as though the person being questioned is showing their guilt by refusing to answer questions and getting a lawyer to represent them.

But in real-life situations, the best advice lawyers give anyone who is being arrested, questioned or contacted in any way by the police is: DON’T TALK. 

It is important for people to know what rights they DO have when agents of repression come sniffing around. And it is especially important to insist on those rights even as they are increasingly coming under attack. 

Bob Avakian has spoken to this point in his social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #106:

As we revcoms (revolutionary communists) have made clear in the Declaration WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM: “So long as we are still living under the rule of this system of capitalism-imperialism, we will defend people against attacks on their lives and on the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.”

So, what rights based on the U.S. Constitution are supposed to apply whether during an arrest or in any contact with police or government agencies? How should people defend their rights individually and collectively, and what kind of culture is needed to resist the government forces of repression?

The Right to Remain Silent—Don't Talk

When facing agents of government repression (here we are talking about the local police and prosecutors, state or federal law enforcement or various government agencies), the principle of "Don't Talk" is an important legal principle overall, and it is crucial in fighting to protect the various movements of resistance and of revolution from government repression. This principle is stressed very strongly by criminal defense lawyers and civil rights organizations—you have a RIGHT to remain silent.

Many legal rights organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and National Lawyers Guild (NLG), have published materials to inform people of their rights. The most important thing they all advise is to assert your right to NOT answer questions. 

For example, the following is from a brochure published by the ACLU of Southern California: 

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE STOPPED BY POLICE, IMMIGRATION AGENTS OR THE FBI:
YOUR RIGHTS 

• You have the right to remain silent. If you wish to exercise that right, say so out loud.
• You have the right to refuse to consent to a search of yourself, your car or your home.
• If you are not under arrest, you have the right to calmly leave.
• You have the right to a lawyer if you are arrested. Ask for one immediately.
• Regardless of your immigration or citizenship status, you have constitutional rights.

And the National Lawyers Guild advises what to do if an FBI agent or police officer knocks at the door:

Do not open the door. State that you are going to remain silent. Do not answer any questions, or even give your name. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly harmless or insignificant, can be used against you or others. Ask the agents to slide their business cards under the door and tell them that your lawyer will contact them. If the agent or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the information to your lawyer.¹² 

What Harm Can Talking Do?

There are many myths and lies promoted in the dominant culture and by the police themselves which leave people confused and feeling they have no choice but to cooperate. This is absolutely wrong and dangerous to any movements of resistance from among the people. 

Myth #1—Cooperating will make the authorities go away.

In fact, it often does just the opposite. After all, if they size someone up as a "talker" or weak link, they'll milk this person for all the information they can get. They may return with more questions or continue this line of questioning with others.

Myth #2—Talking will prevent being arrested.

The authorities promote the illusion that a person should try to "save their own hide" by cooperating and talking. In reality, as the ACLU and NLG underscore, in many circumstances talking may increase the chances of a person being busted, and may be sealing the case against himself/herself as well as others.

Myth #3—As long as the information provided is harmless, there's nothing wrong with talking.

When people don't know their rights and talk freely to the authorities, this can do great harm—no matter what information they provide.

First of all, because the person doesn't know the full agenda of the authorities, he/she has no basis to evaluate whether or not information is "harmless." Even if the authorities claim to be investigating something that has nothing to do with your politics or political activities (or those of others), appearances can be deceiving. The authorities can and will twist any information to their advantage.

Secondly, the act of talking encourages the authorities to pursue this tactic and go after others.

Finally, and most importantly, talking fuels the government's efforts to eliminate any movements of opposition and dissent, while standing firm and not talking as a matter of principle contributes to building a culture of resistance and defiance.

Myth #4—If I don't cooperate, won't it look like I have something to hide?

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR),

This is one of the most frequently asked questions. The answer involves the nature of political "intelligence" investigations and the job of the FBI. Agents will try to make you feel that it will "look bad" if you don't cooperate with them. Many people not familiar with how the FBI operates worry about being uncooperative…. (T)hey [the FBI] are intent on learning about the habits, opinions, and affiliations of people not suspected of wrongdoing....

They will do anything to get a person to talk: from good cop/bad cop approaches (aimed at getting the person to "open up" to the more sympathetic cop) to threats and outright brutality. They also use "mind games" such as saying that others have already informed on a person; or even going so far as falsely telling someone a family member has died in order to get the person to let down his/her guard and reveal information about themselves or others.

Any information that a person provides—no matter how seemingly insignificant—can be twisted and used against that person themselves, or against people and organizations who expose and oppose the crimes of this system. The government has a long history of lying about the facts and fabricating "evidence" in order to frame movement activists and revolutionaries. They take intelligence gathered from a variety of sources and use it in the most sinister ways, even including murder. Consequently, there is no reason to be in the least defensive about not talking to or cooperating with authorities.

If a person thinks that he/she can just "bullshit" an agent, this too is a trap. The investigators are trained to be "friendly" and listen to people's stories. To quote a textbook on interrogation techniques, "Letting the subject tell a few lies, and letting him apparently get away with them, is an excellent technique, and works well with many types of subjects. We have seen that lying on the part of the subject works to the advantage of the interrogator...." The NLG has pointed out:

Keep in mind that although they are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and " do not consent to a search." [emphasis added]¹³

Conclusion

As spoken to throughout this article, as part of trying to beat down movements of resistance and of revolution, agents of the government (police, FBI, prosecutors, etc.) have developed methods to trick, intimidate and brutalize people into giving up legal rights and protections established by the legal system in this country. This basic dynamic and truth needs to be clearly understood, and if various organizations and movements are serious about the challenges they face, they need to grapple with how—mainly by relying on mass movements of the people—to resist such repression.

History has shown that when the decent people refuse to concede the moral authority on what is right and what is wrong, they are better able to withstand repression and continue to develop resistance. If they do not take this approach, they find themselves in a situation where: That which you do not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn—or be forced—to accept. Part of building a culture of defiance and resistance among people standing up against fascism and the crimes of this system is refusing to allow the government to either intimidate or bamboozle people into giving up resistance, and refusing in any way to enter into complicity with such intimidation and repression.

In this context, the legal principles underlying "Don't Talk" take on heightened importance. Those confronted by police agents should not be bamboozled into giving up the legal rights they do have, as this will only lead to strengthening the repressive apparatus of the state, and help to undercut the ability to struggle against the crimes of this system and to build a movement for revolution to overthrow this system and bring about a fundamentally different and much better system.