All Out for New Year’s Eve!
No New Year Under This Old System!
December 29, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Over the past few weeks, the powers-that-be have tried to put a lid on the mass upheaval that so beautifully and powerfully burst forward this fall, using arrests, intimidation, and confusion. No! What people have been fighting against is too deeply entrenched in this system, too brutally unjust in its effects, and too utterly unnecessary for us to allow those on top to suppress or to derail it. This struggle has involved tens of thousands and changed the thinking of millions—too much has been begun to allow the powers to turn this around. Their attempts to rule the protest and resistance of the people out of order must be dramatically opposed, and new thousands must be and can be called forward in doing this right on New Year’s Eve itself.
New Year’s must set the tone for this whole coming year. There are thousands who can be called forward now and involved in these actions. Yes, those who came forward in their tens of thousands to fight for justice against the reign of unpunished police murder of Black and Latino people in this so-called “land of the free.” Yes, those who see a profit-over-all system hurtling things toward the destruction of the environment. Yes, women and men who hate the way that women are degraded, humiliated, robbed of basic rights and oppressed in this so-called modern society, who hate all of the gender oppression done to LGBT people. Yes, people who have stood up against what the U.S. and its allies like Israel do to people all over the world, including the most depraved and sadistic torture by the CIA and the outright genocidal attacks in Palestine. And yes, most definitely yes, to those standing up in solidarity with the people of Mexico against the government’s outrageous murder of 43 students and the cover-up that has followed. All these different forces, and more besides, should bring in signs pointing to the outrages they are fighting—and if there is cross-fertilization, and people with all different kinds of signs, even better!!
In short, let there be a festival of resistance—of different forces from different perspectives, bringing in all sorts of different issues and signs against different forms of oppression and injustice... marching, chanting and joining together in the spirit of defiance and determination to make 2015 even more powerful than 2014—even more widespread and determined, and even deeper in its challenge to what gives rise to and is at the root of police murder and mass incarceration and the whole question of “race” in America… as well as even broader in spreading this spirit of defiance to be acting against all the other horrors in all their forms… a festival of resistance up against this system's orgy of oppression!
There is still time to make this happen on the scale it needs to. Just this past Thanksgiving, the demonstration against the Macy’s parade was organized overnight on Twitter, and people turned up at 7 a.m. to be there—and this then set the terms for the news that day. There is no reason why people cannot now tap into the creativity of this growing movement, reach out to many new people, and find imaginative ways to make this a big deal in the press. There are many, many groups working on these questions; so long as they want to see some basic change in a positive direction, involve them—new or old. And if there is a battle for a permit, in any city, make it a fight that everyone knows about and becomes part of, making it a battle for the right to protest and drawing even more people into the fight and into the streets.
This is a rare time. What was not possible six months ago is possible today. What was not conceivable a year ago is conceivable today. The challenge to those who want to see this struggle deepened, strengthened, and carried forward, is to conceive, to imagine, and then to carry out what we conceive on the scale that is now possible.
On New Year’s itself: bring the revolution into all this. Get out word on the dialogue between Cornel West and Bob Avakian, “Revolution and Religion: the Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion,” and the whole campaign to raise big funds to get BA Everywhere. Get out word about the revcom.us website, and get out copies of Revolution newspaper, far and wide, on the spot.
In short, make this a New Year’s Eve where something really NEW can be celebrated, in struggle up against the old.
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