Why I'm A Godless Communist and Why You Should Be One Too!

A Report on Talking to Students at a Small Midwestern College about Casting Off Religion, Liberating Women, and Emancipating Humanity

By Sunsara Taylor | December 19, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

I recently had the chance to speak at a very small college in a very small town (under 8,000 people) in the Midwest. I was invited by the secular student group. They explained that they had done several events in the past that were very good, but also a little "safe" in the sense that they focused on people's stories of how they personally became atheists, or focused on the basis for ethics and morality without god. As important as these themes are, they hadn't yet brought a speaker who argued directly that religion is harmful and certainly not one who connected up the fight for atheism with the fight to fully liberate women and to make the kind of communist revolution that can emancipate humanity. They were excited to expose students to a more radical perspective and I was very excited to speak to and learn from these students and others. The title of my talk was "Why I Am A Godless Communist and Why You Should Be One Too! Sunsara Taylor speaks on Casting Off Religion, Liberating Women and Emancipating Humanity."

I spoke about how I became an atheist and then a communist and the ways that patriarchy (the domination of women by men) is woven into Christianity as well as every other major religion in the world today. I got into many of the other harms of religion, both the specific harmful content of biblical morality as well as the way it trains people to not think critically, and I argued for science, a scientific approach to knowing and changing the world. Throughout my speech I drew heavily from, and cited the works of, Bob Avakian, especially his book, AWAY WITH ALL GODS! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. I also argued for the new synthesis of communist revolution that has been developed by Bob Avakian. I ended my talk by speaking about communist morality and quoting from one of my favorite quotes (5:23) from Bob Avakian's book, BAsics:

"If you have had a chance to see the world as it really is, there are profoundly different roads you can take with your life. You can just get into the dog-eat-dog, and most likely get swallowed up by that while trying to get ahead in it. You can put your snout into the trough and try to scarf up as much as you can, while scrambling desperately to get more than others. Or you can try to do something that would change the whole direction of society and the whole way the world is. When you put those things alongside each other, which one has any meaning, which one really contributes to anything worthwhile? Your life is going to be about something—or it's going to be about nothing. And there is nothing greater your life can be about than contributing whatever you can to the revolutionary transformation of society and the world, to put an end to all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation and all the unnecessary suffering and destruction that goes along with them. I have learned that more and more deeply through all the twists and turns and even the great setbacks, as well as the great achievements, of the communist revolution so far, in what are really still its early stages historically."

Even though it was a rather small grouping of students and professors who had gathered, it was very exciting to be able to share all of this with them and what I really want to share with readers of Revolution is some of the richness of the exchanges that followed my speech.

Most, if not everyone, who attended were atheists. But, like me, most of them grew up Christian and most of them grew up in extremely conservative small towns or small cities in the Midwest. Like me, several of them had never met an atheist (or at least never met someone who admitted to being an atheist) until they were in college. Many of them were very concerned about sexism and the religious attacks on women's rights to abortion and birth control and quite a few of them were critical of other aspects of this system's crimes against the people. But none of them had heard of Bob Avakian or thought a whole lot about what a real communist revolution would look like in the world today.

During the question and answer session that followed my speech, the first question was from a young professor who grew up surrounded by extreme right-wing fundamentalism. He cited the atheist author Sam Harris as having argued that there is no point in making logical arguments to people who are trapped in a religious fundamentalist thinking because that framework makes them "immune" to logic. He expressed frustration at how he has provided ample facts and irrefutable evidence in his many arguments with fundamentalists only to watch this be disregarded and cast aside because the fundamentalists were proceeding based on blind faith and religious fervor. He noted favorably that he had watched the youtubes of my appearances on Bill O'Reilly's show over the years and wanted to know why I thought it was worth it to argue with people who were very closed in their thinking and whether I thought this could be effective.

I responded that Sam Harris has a point; it is true that religion, and fundamentalist religion in particular, trains people to disregard the facts and logic when it conflicts with what they are told is the "literal word of god." But I argued that Sam Harris is leaving something very critical out. The subtitle of Bob Avakian's book on religion is "Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World" for a reason. It is impossible to change the world without changing people's thinking and their modes of thinking, and it is impossible to fully change people's thinking in a truly mass way without bringing in the stakes for humanity and without actually fighting to transform the horrific and empty conditions of life that make people seek the false comfort of religion. I argued, as Avakian does, that we have to hit hard at the foundations of religion and force people to confront the contradictions between the core of their religious beliefs, on the one hand, and reality and what most people think is moral and good, on the other.

I said I always get a kick out of it when atheists will ridicule the Bible in the face of fundamentalists by saying things like, "Isn't that a poly-cotton blend you are wearing? Looks like you are a sinner!" (Leviticus 19:19 condemns wearing fabrics woven from two different materials.) However, whether someone wears a "blended fabric" really doesn't have any real social significance and so it is unlikely to be important enough to cause someone to question things they have been indoctrinated in for their entire lives. It is better to cite the Biblical commandments to do things like stone women if they are not virgins when they get married (Deuteronomy 22:14-21), to kill children if they are disobedient to their parents, to whip slaves (Luke 12:47—cited very powerfully in the new film 12 Years A Slave), or the many instances in which the Bible contradicts itself and where Jesus is shown to be completely ignorant of basic science or even his own scripture (see AWAY WITH ALL GODS!). These are things where the immorality and errors in the Bible have enormous stakes.

It is not that everyone will be convinced to let go of their belief in the Bible and god because these outrageous commandments of the Bible are pointed out to them. Some will reveal that they are willing to go along with truly fascist and horrific crimes. But others will be forced up against the contradictions in their own thinking that they have probably always pushed aside and never directly looked at: the contradiction between what they and many people think is right and what the Bible commands. These foundations of religious belief must be relentlessly hammered at, sharpening up the contradiction between what people think and reality, as well as the contradictions within people's thinking. It is in this way that we can fracture the foundations of many people's closed systems of religious thought and repolarize and transform the thinking of blocs of people. If we go at it in this kind of way, even the people who more openly own up to the horrific passages of the Bible (and other religious belief), or who make illogical contortions in order to both deny passages of the Bible and insist that the entire Bible is the literal word of god, will be part of what helps highlight to others what is wrong with their mode of thinking.

The second question was from a young woman who is pro-choice, but had never heard abortion spoken of as something positive, "Isn't there a limit, though, on when a woman should be able to get an abortion? Is it always a good thing?" I spoke to why abortion is a very positive thing on several levels. First, scientifically fetuses are not people and abortion is not murder. There is nothing wrong with it. But, if you treat a fetus like a person you have to treat the woman as less than human, as just an incubator or vessel. While there are sometimes circumstances which are tragic or sad that contribute to the need for the abortion, that doesn't mean that the abortion is tragic or sad. For example, if a woman gets pregnant from being raped, it is the rape that is the crime. The ability to get an abortion so that she is not forced to bear the child of her rapist is profoundly positive and liberating. If a woman wants a child but experiences medical complications during pregnancy, it is the medical complications which are tragic. The ability to get an abortion to ensure her safety and eliminate unnecessary suffering is profoundly positive and liberating. And beyond all that, most women who get abortions later in pregnancy either wanted to have a child and discovered that there were untenable complications, or they are women or girls who could not find an abortion earlier in pregnancy either because of the cost, the restrictions, the stigma, or the outright ignorance about their bodies. Women will always need abortion to be available at every point in pregnancy and this should be available on demand and without apology. The young woman nodded approvingly as I walked this through.

Next, a young guy asked, "What exactly do you mean by revolution?" People throw the word "revolution" around so much and mean so many different things by it. I specified that when I used the word I didn't just mean a lot of social upheaval or a change in attitudes, but, as Bob Avakian puts it in BAsics, "...Revolution means nothing less than the defeat and dismantling of the existing, oppressive state, serving the capitalist-imperialist system—and in particular its institutions of organized violence and repression, including its armed forces, police, courts, prisons, bureaucracies and administrative power—and the replacement of those reactionary institutions, those concentrations of reactionary coercion and violence, with revolutionary organs of political power, and other revolutionary institutions and governmental structures, whose basis has been laid through the whole process of building the movement for revolution, and then carrying out the seizure of power, when the conditions for that have been brought into being—which in a country like the U.S. would require a qualitative change in the objective situation, resulting in a deep-going crisis in society, and the emergence of a revolutionary people in the millions and millions, who have the leadership of a revolutionary communist vanguard and are conscious of the need for revolutionary change and determined to fight for it..." [from BAsics 3:3] . This definitely clarified for him and others what exactly I was referring to. It also opened up a whole new round of discussion. A senior who is studying environmental science argued for pacifism (non-violence) as the only way that positive change could come about. She argued that the problem with violence, and the problem with communism, has been the outlook that "the ends justify the means." In this way, she argued, violence is allowed to consume the very liberating goals people may have started out fighting for.

I began my response by making clear that I respect many people who have stood up to injustice motivated by pacifism, some of them sacrificing tremendously, and that if she is serious about this outlook that she should politically resist the most vicious and massive organs of violence in the world, the military, police forces, and other organs of imperialist state power. If she follows through on her convictions in this regard, we will find ourselves shoulder to shoulder on many occasions. At the same time, however, it is necessary to take apart whether or not pacifism is a viable approach to emancipating humanity. I also differentiated between oppressive violence and liberating violence, for example the oppressive violence of a rapist is extremely different from the liberating violence of someone fighting off her rapist, even if it requires injuring him.

I made very clear that we are not currently in a revolutionary situation and as such, it would be not only wrong but harmful for individuals or groups to engage in isolated acts of violence; this would only serve to get people crushed and spread demoralization. Instead, there is tremendous need for—and a strategy developed as a key dimension of Bob Avakian's new synthesis and as a foundation of the line of the Revolutionary Communist Party—preparing minds and organizing forces for revolution, for hastening while awaiting the development of a revolutionary crisis. A key part of this is the approach of fighting the power and transforming the people for revolution. However, when there is an all-out revolutionary crisis—when the ruling class is deeply divided and fighting amongst themselves, when millions and millions see the existing order as completely illegitimate, and when there exists a far-sighted vanguard party with deep ties to the masses and a winning strategy—it would be necessary for the masses of people to defeat and dismantle the old order and its organs of massive, oppressive, violence (its courts, police forces, military, prisons, etc.).

While she quickly agreed that there are forms of violence that can be liberating, she limited this to what she described as "self-defense," asserting that in any situation of war the role of violence just takes over and becomes a corrupting force both to those carrying it out and to the goals they began by proclaiming and aiming to fight for. I argued that communists, and this is something that has been fiercely fought for by Bob Avakian, must utilize means that are consistent with their ends. In the kind of all-out crisis that makes revolution possible, including the existence of a revolutionary people numbering in their millions, this would necessarily include revolutionary warfare or else the massive violence and death that this system enforces on the planet every single day will go on without relent. But, even in these circumstances, the way in which revolutionary forces fight would be guided by a liberating morality and vision of the society it they are striving to bring into being.

I gave examples of how the People's Army during the Chinese Communist Revolution had rules of discipline that included things like never stealing a needle or a piece of thread from the masses of people, never raping or abusing women, and that the gun should be guided by politics (as opposed to politics being guided by the gun). I acknowledged that during this young woman's lifetime there haven't been very many wars fought on a revolutionary and liberatory basis, but gave the example of the Vietnamese National Liberation fighters, during the U.S. war on Vietnam. They did political education with many of the soldiers they captured, especially African American troops, and actually influenced the thinking of many of the soldiers right within the military they were simultaneously, of profound necessity, fighting to defeat militarily. And I used an example that Avakian uses in his talk, Revolution: Why It's Necessary; Why It's Possible; What It's All About, from the movie Spartacus. During that slave rebellion, Spartacus led the slaves to use violence to get free. But after they won their freedom, Spartacus stopped the former slaves from torturing their former captors, arguing that by doing so the freed slaves would simply turn into the very thing they had been fighting against. This was another example of the difference between the liberating violence that was necessary to get free, and the oppressive violence of torturing people at any time or for any reason.

The young woman and I went back and forth several times over this question and I won't recount all of it here. But, as we spoke, part of what became clear is that she really didn't see that we live in a system and that there is a state that includes massive organs of violence that defend and enforce (and can only defend and enforce) the existing way of life with all its profound exploitation, unnecessary death and suffering, and destruction of the planet. At one point she argued that everyone as individuals should just stop being violent, including people in the military or police, and that this would be the way to change the world. I argued that that notion was fanciful and out of line with the reality of what the state is. The U.S. military, for instance, is not just a collection of people. It is an institution that acts on behalf of and in the service of the U.S.'s system of capitalism-imperialism and global domination. I walked through the reality that there is not only incredible indoctrination and orders given to ensure the troops carrying out violence in the interests of the system, but there are punishments enforced against people should they refuse.

But I also suggested that we see if others wanted to comment either on the same topic or on a different topic. Off of this, another young professor posed that perhaps in the course of an actual revolution there would be sections of the military and the police forces who would lay down their arms and either be won over to the revolution or at least won not to repress it. Several other hands had gone up, so before I responded to him I called on others.

A young woman began by saying that she knows several people who have gone into the military recently and that when they came home after basic training the things they told her really upset her. "One of them was made to do a practice raid during training where they were told to go into a building and kill everyone in it, including the children!" Off of this, someone else in the room piped up, "Yeah, I don't think they are all going to be won to put down their arms."

Another young woman then raised her hand and somewhat hesitantly began to share something she seemed not to have told all that many people. Her friend's mom used to be a cop in a pretty large Midwestern city and had told her some stories of what it was like, "She said that sometimes, if the police shot someone accidentally or, like, during a chase, and if it turned out that the person wasn't armed, sometimes the cops would just put a gun down near the dead body so that it looked like they had killed the person in self-defense." Her friend's mom hadn't lasted long as a cop and was troubled to this day by the things that she had seen.

I was extremely struck by the two examples that had been brought forward. This was very different than what I had initially anticipated from both of the students when they started their comments by detailing their personal connections to either military or police officers. Their comments served to underscore the reality that both the military and police forces are institutions that serve a certain function and that individuals within them are molded to carry out that overall function, or else punished or driven out. I spoke to this a bit more fully, but then returned to the woman who first raised the question of pacifism. I posed that while I disagreed on a deep scientific basis with the viewpoint of pacifism, I was not at all arguing that the dangers she was posing—of lofty goals being consumed and undermined by the means that people might take up to fight for them—was not real. There are millions and millions of people for whom life every day is a bitter and living hell and who would, if there were an actual revolutionary uprising, form the backbone of the revolutionary fighters. In an actual revolution, there would be strong impulses towards revenge and there would be the unleashing of tremendous pent-up and justified anger. I spoke of the millions locked in prisons, others terrorized by police and locked in desperate poverty in the ghettoes and barrios, women who have been brutalized and terrorized by men their whole lives, and more. If there is not a far-sighted revolutionary vanguard party that can lead this and give it direction, and if that party is not building up growing ranks of revolutionary people and broadly popularizing and repolarizing all of society around its revolutionary aims, methods, and goals, starting now and all the way leading up to such a revolutionary crisis then it is very difficult to conceive of such an uprising going anywhere positive. I spoke to the importance of bringing forward emancipators of humanity and of the aim of the movement for revolution today being bringing forward hundreds who are influencing thousands today and preparing to lead millions when the all-out struggle for power is the order of the day. I spoke of the way this goes on through the work to popularize Bob Avakian, through the distribution of Revolution newspaper and its website revcom.us, and through the ongoing approach of fighting the power and transforming the people for revolution.

She, and others, got the sense that the Revolutionary Communist Party doesn't dismiss the very real contradictions involved in making revolution. On the other hand, this got her thinking even more deeply about the contradictions involved and she asked, as the final question of the official program, whether it really is possible to have the oppressed of this society make a revolution that aims at emancipation, given that the people who are the most in need of revolution have also been the most systematically uneducated. Wouldn't they just "lash out"? She was giving voice to a very big concern and fear that keeps many people from among the middle strata, even many very progressive people who have deep criticisms of this system and deep sympathies with the oppressed, from even considering real revolution.

I spoke a bit more about the RCP's statement on the strategy for revolution and then shared some of the examples of the work that the Party is doing now among the most oppressed, including the efforts to get Revolution newspaper into the prisons and the incredible impact this has had. But I also told the truth, that the impact is still far, far too embryonic and needs to be going on on a qualitatively greater scale. There are enormous and urgent stakes to this. So, I put the challenge back to her and to everyone in the audience that she and others need to be part of making this go on on a qualitatively greater scale and with enormously greater impact. We can see in microcosm the difference it makes to get BA (Bob Avakian) and the voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper (revcom.us), out very broadly among the oppressed and among others. But this needs to go on all throughout society. It needs to be unavoidable in the ghettoes and barrios as well as the suburbs and the college campuses, in the prisons and in the media and arts, among all strata and every nationality, and people—even people like themselves who are just hearing about this for the first time and just beginning to check this out themselves—have a responsibility not only to get into this, but to help spread it through their own efforts as well as through contributing to the major campaign underway to raise major funds to get BA Everywhere.

We had gone well beyond the time officially allotted for the event and no one had gotten up to leave. I thanked the organizers again for bringing me out and everyone for coming and listening so intently and engaging so seriously and let everyone know I would stick around to speak informally with anyone who wanted to. Most people headed out pretty quickly, but not before thanking me briefly or making some small comment. One young professor said simply, "I had never heard of Bob Avakian before, but I am definitely going to read some of him now." A few students stuck around and after talking for a while we all decided to go to a local coffee shop where we joked and had a lot of fun and continued to dig into these and other crucial questions of philosophy, morality, communism's history and future, and the fate of humanity.

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