This week, we want to focus your attention on a segment from the last episode of The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show where Lenny Wolff and Noche Diaz discuss the war in Ukraine and issue an invitation to join Revolutionary Internationalist May 1st marches in NYC and LA under the slogans

NO US/NATO WAR WITH RUSSIA! NO WORLD WAR 3!
IT’S THIS SYSTEM, NOT HUMANITY, THAT NEEDS TO BECOME EXTINCT!

and

WE DON’T ACCEPT THEIR FUTURE, IT’S TIME TO GET ORGANIZED FOR A REAL REVOLUTION.

This, together with the entire episode, informs a great deal of how revolutionaries should be oriented toward having major impact while drawing more people into the revolution in the coming weeks.

We also want to continue to emphasize, for new and veteran members of the Revolution Clubs:

1) the simple clarity of principles, goals, and methods given by the 6 Points of Attention for the Revolution. These are a moral and ideological standard, a point of entry and model to impact all of society with what kind of people we need to be, projecting and fighting for a whole new world.

2) the ongoing importance of The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show and weekly RNL Circles where people can come together and grapple with the questions concentrated in the show of why we need a revolution, what this revolution involves and what kind of society this is aiming for.

With that, we’ll leave you with what was highlighted on revcom.us last week from Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For That Revolution where Bob Avakian said:

… The crisis and deep divisions in society can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means or radically emancipating revolutionary means.

With all this, what is urgently needed, what is possible—and what must be actively, tirelessly worked for, in order for there to truly be a positive outcome to all this—is a fundamentally different alignment in the country as a whole: a Repolarization that is favorable for, and brings forward the necessary forces for, Revolution—a real revolution to overthrow this system, and bring into being a radically different and much better system.

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Provocation In The Belly of The Beast. Experiments with Challenging American Chauvinism

Some of us on the Revolution Tour have been wrestling with the articles from Bob Avakian (BA) that take on the way huge numbers of people are being whipped up by American chauvinism into shameless support for U.S. imperialist intervention in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been working on developing, and experimenting with, provocations based on this to sharply jolt people and make them confront what is wrong with how they are being led to think. As the situation continues to develop, it is even more urgent to take this on while people who are rallying behind the U.S. are pushing for a “No-Fly Zone” which could involve the U.S. directly militarily and set off a situation that could lead to a major war with the threat of nuclear exchanges that would be a nightmare for humanity. Now, with Biden going over to Europe and making what many consider a barely veiled threat against Putin, these risks are even greater and the urgency to learning how to reach into people all the more pressing. Read more

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Breaking from the Narrowness of the "Day-to-Day" 
Building the Revolution Clubs, and Returning to BA

Some thoughts from Michelle Xai, a leader in the Revolution Clubs

I think it is really important that all of us continue to return to Bob Avakian’s (BA’s) talk, “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution.”

Sometimes we shorthand the analysis there and lose what is actually being said about the urgency of the situation AND the potential to change things.

Returning to the talk has helped me really think about the analysis SCIENTIFICALLY. What I mean by this is that the “something terrible” part sometimes gets thought about as “the situation is so urgent that we just know we need to do something” (which we do) and we become all panicky just trying to get “out there” and do something (which, again, of course we need to get out there).  Read more

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To Young People Involved in RiseUp4AbortionRights and the Revolution Clubs:

March 27, 2022

To Young People Involved in RiseUp4AbortionRights and the Revolution Clubs:

I am writing to (1) share with you my best recent arguments for what is necessary in relation to the abortion rights emergency, and to (2) invite you to share with me your biggest questions about all this, and (3) solicit your ideas on how to take this fight forward. 
. . . 
Finally, I'd like your ideas on how to take this fight forward. Are there things you think need to be done that we are not yet doing? Do you have ideas for how we spread the Green Bandanas and build this fight to what it needs to be on April 8th and 9th and going forward to bring millions in the streets bringing all of society to a halt, reaching into every major institution and campus and workplace and beyond? What do you think needs to be done to reach that?

Thanks in advance for your responses!

Warmly, 
Sunsara Taylor Read more

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Watching The RNL Show, Confronting Reality, and Forging New Collective Strength

from a member of the National Tour to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution

This week, the Revolution Club in Los Angeles pulled together by Zoom a newly forming “RNL Circle.” RNL circles are collectivities of club members and others checking out the club, coming together weekly to watch The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, discuss it, and work together to apply what we’re learning there.

...

The show was Episode 93, “War in Ukraine & War on Women: Dangerous Times, Fearless Truth, Raising Hell & Getting to the Root.” After we watched it, people shared what they were getting from it. There was a lot of appreciation for how the show shined a light, and gave much-needed perspective, about the situation in Ukraine, what the “no-fly zone” is about, and how to understand the way people’s sentiments are being directed. A number of people expressed feeling like the show was having them confront some things about reality that they either don’t know, or are at times afraid to confront. This was connected, in part, to the fact the people usually don’t see any hope or possibility in confronting the real dangers of things like WWIII or nuclear war. Read more

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Fueling the fire, and getting organized for revolution 
Watching The RNL Show after International Women’s Day

from a member of the National Revolution Tour

On March 8, International Women’s Day, people came out into the streets together, launching a real fight to keep abortion legal. Two days later, the Revolution Club, Los Angeles was able to bring together a crew of people on Zoom who wanted to learn more about the Club, to watch and get into the new episode [Ep. 92] of The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. The show was reporting on this monumental beginning and giving leadership to how to fight forward.

This was a rich experience, where we all were learning from each other, and from The RNL Show. This underlined the potential of RNL circles as an important way people can come together in a beginning, but meaningful, form of revolutionary organization. Read more

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Opening Up the Debate at a Law School: 
“Woke” Surrender vs. Rising Up for Abortion Rights

from members of the National Tour to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution

There is an untapped fury of millions of women (and men) about the precipice we are on of the Supreme Court ripping away one of women’s most basic rights, the right to abortion. At the same time many people who were aware of the Texas decision do not even know the Supreme Court decision is only months away. This is in large part because the Democratic Party and those beholden to them in the women’s and reproductive rights movements are not sounding the alarm. Why? Because they have surrendered before the fact and are instead preparing for a “Post-Roe America.” The so called “resistance” is calling for no resistance—so enslaved to the system they are willing to enslave women.

This has been a point of contention at a law school where people who DO know what is happening with the Supreme Court ruling are accommodating themselves to this decision coming down. A contingent of the student body who are “woke” have made it a point to “not engage” the challenges to this deadly logic that have been made by the Revolution Club taking up the call from RiseUp4AbortionRights.org. Read more

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Turning Heads in an Arts District on a Saturday Afternoon

Members of the National Tour to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution went out to stir the air on a sunny weekend in an arts district. A few of us wore bloody pants to symbolize what happens when abortion is illegal. We got people’s attention and spoke to people briefly with the sharp challenge: As the Supreme Court moves to rip up away abortion rights… if you will NOT fight against forced motherhood, then you ARE choosing the enslavement of women.

Stickers got up everywhere... hangers were hung all through downtown. Read more

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High School Students Spreading the Word... Organizing Each Other 
“What if you’re a teenage girl and you can’t have a kid, then what?”

In working to make March 8^th the kind of protest it needs to be and bring people into the fight for abortion rights and revolution, the revcoms have been reaching out to high school students.  We’ve mainly run into students who are shocked to learn that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade and take away the right to abortion.

At our first time out at one high school, a group of young women were outraged to find out how serious the attack on abortion rights has gotten. “Why the hell do men get to decide what I do with my own body?” one of them said angrily. This was a common sentiment shared by many students. Some took stickers and flyers which they immediately started putting up in key places where other students would see. The Revolution Club phone number and social media handle was on the flyers and students started calling and following as soon as they got them (literally within a half hour). Read more

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Initial Experience With Starting An Ad-Hoc Committee for International Women's Day 
Learning From Each Other... Forging a Collective Mission

from a member of the Revolution Club

... If the protest for International Women's Day is really going to be what's needed – the beginning of sustained, defiant protest—it has to involve and unleash healthcare workers, progressive religious forces, lawyers, actors and artists, a whole range of movement forces who see the danger... and determined and angry students and youth.  This has to get way out of any one organization’s hands... spreading and being taken up all over. 

But for this to really take off, there does need to be a real mass core—cohered organized forces to unleash this.  And this hasn't taken off spontaneously.  So as part of taking responsibility for the movement as a whole—a few of us with the Revolution Club are seeing the need to bring together those who are not yet won to taking up the banner of revolution but who would want to fight around this fundamental question.  Without submerging ourselves into it, we're working to initiate broader organization to take up the call from RiseUp4AbortionRights.org.

We've had two Zoom meetings of an Ad-Hoc Organizing Committee for International Women's Day, putting the need to people that there needs to be a local chapter of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, with them and others taking responsibility for this while we would work with them to make this happen. Read more

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High School Students Say NO to Forced Motherhood and Start Getting Organized

At a Black college expo this past weekend, hundreds of Black and Latino college-bound youths encountered the National Revolution Tour and a challenge and invitation to fight for their future.  Students took flyers showing the reality that as they plan their futures, the U.S. Supreme Court is about to rip away abortion rights now. This was a shock to the vast majority of students who had no idea the Court is weighing a case that could change the whole society this way and affect all of their lives.

Students said things like, “Women need to be able to have the choice—what if you’re not ready to have a baby?” or “what about women who get raped?” Throughout the day, they stopped to talk in groups or came up to the table. We exposed how they are being kept in the dark by the “leaders” of the women’s movement and Democratic Party who are giving up without a fight and they shouldn’t let anyone tell them to accept this, or that they have to wait until they can vote. Voting can’t do shit about this, but they can, by raising hell, like we did two years ago after the murder of George Floyd. Read more

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Fight against forced motherhood or choose the enslavement of women? 
Challenging university students to make a choice and to act

Within a few months, women could be stripped of their right to abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court. Millions who care about the rights of women are being led to quietly accept this, by a “pro-choice movement” that has largely given up in advance. While working on the ways to really raise hell at the colleges, high schools and in other ways, members of the National Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour were at a university last week challenging students with a sharp provocation and ways for them to self-organize on the real terms of this fight, which is the enslavement or the emancipation of women.

We posted up at a busy walkway where students go through usually not paying attention to anything more than what’s in their own heads. We had a sign and flyers and literally stopped people to ask them to answer this question:

Now, as the Supreme Court moves quickly to rip away abortion rights…
If you will NOT fight against forced motherhood,
Then you ARE choosing the enslavement of women.
Which do you choose?
Into the streets March 8. Read more

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Correspondence from a member of Revolution Club, Chicago—

Building Revolutionary Organization Through Watching The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show

A recent Zoom call crackled with energy after more than a dozen people watched The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show together. People spoke one after another. Here’s some of what they said:

“The hoods I came up in, I was taught at an early age, that you have to have more than three girlfriends. My mentor, on the streets, taught me how to degrade women. As a young boy I learned to treat women as sex objects. I was like eight or nine years old and I was like, I want six, or even 12, girlfriends. You begin to view women as beings to be exploited. And it doesn't change with the church. The church teaches the same thing about what woman’s place should be. Not as equals.”

“Billie Eilish has some good points. I hear people say, ‘I got my own OnlyFans.’ They say, ‘We are taking porn away from the porn studios and controlling things ourselves.’ Look what happens to women all around the world who are forced into sexual slavery. The majority of women have no choice. I listened to this former porn star Mia Khalifa say you can’t make porn less brutal, you can’t say no to anything during a porn shoot and have to put up with all this degrading stuff. A woman asked me during sex, ‘Do you want to choke me.’ No! This is what is considered sexy and edgy. This is very harmful and progressively getting worse.” Read more

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At School Board Meeting Hounded by Fascists, Revcoms Defend Those Under Attack

At a recent school board meeting in Placentia, a small town in suburban Orange County, California, the Revolution Club showed up as a disciplined force entering into a sea of a hundred or more anti-mask, white-supremacist Christian fascists who have been threatening board members and disrupting their meetings.

The public meeting was held outside because meetings have been overrun with fascists who refuse to wear masks. Physical barriers were set up to protect school board members from their rabid audience and police stood nearby. In an eerie scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale, dozens of fascists gathered in a prayer circle before the open meeting and  began to ask God to punish those school board members they see as an obstacle to their reactionary agenda. Many of these well-organized fascist parents wore red T-shirts saying “I’ll pull them,” meaning unless their demented demands are met, they’ll pull their kids out of the schools of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, which would be a loss of funding to the district at $10,000 a year per student.

The fascists are demanding the end of mask and vaccine mandates—the dismantling of life-saving health protections during a pandemic which has killed 5 million people worldwide and 900,000 in this country so far. Many are also demanding to ban “Critical Race Theory,” by which they mean any teaching of the truth about the oppression of Black people and other oppressed peoples, as well as any efforts for school curriculum to recognize the humanity of LGBT people. This is part of an organized national movement to enforce a fascist America—on the federal and local levels—through terrorizing and taking over school boards, election boards and more.  Read more

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Out to Shake Up the Campuses and Organize Forces for Revolution

from a member of the National Tour to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution

In this time of society ripping apart, the National Tour to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution is hitting the streets and the campuses, aiming to jolt people awake to the real-world fascist danger looming, and in opposition to that, the real possibility of making an emancipating revolution if we get organized for this revolution.

Last week we focused on a state college in the LA area. This campus draws in a mix of students—multinational, from different strata, some that have grown up in the hard neighborhoods of LA and others from surrounding areas. There’s also an organized and vocal white-supremacist, male-supremacist, Christian fascist core of students on this campus. 

Over three days, we put to people the basic challenge to come hear a speech:

While the whole society is being ripped apart and the planet burns:

The Republican-fascists are preparing for civil war and the Democrats are failing miserably;

YOU are sick of being told to fight over “privilege,” reforms and “inclusion” in a rotting oppressive empire;

WE are fighting and organizing for an ACTUAL revolution in these times when revolution can be made.

Learn about and get with this revolution.  Read more

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