If you want a scientific understanding of the oppression of Black people, and a reality-based program and strategy for doing away with ALL oppression, then you need to check out BA.

The following are from some of the works by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Much more can be found at www.revcom.us/avakian. Most of the quotes on this page are from BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian.

There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.

Bob Avakian, Chairman, Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, 2015

REVOLUTION AND RELIGION

"The film brings you up close inside Cornel West's and Bob Avakian's dialogue: the passion, the audacity, the science, the morality, the revolutionary substance. Two courageous voices modeling a morality that refuses to accept injustice – pouring heart and soul into standing together challenging all of us to fight for a world worthy of humanity."

Andy Zee,
co-director of the film

WATCH THE FILM NOW!

A Must-See Film!

Disc 1
HOW LONG MUST THIS NIGHTMARE OF OPPRESSION & BRUTALITY GO ON?
Not God, Not "Unchanging Human Nature," Not Conspiracy...
A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING REALITY
WHY THINGS ARE THE WAY THEY ARE... THEY HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY... THEY CAN BE RADICALLY CHANGED
• The USA: Founded on Slavery & Genocide
• The Oppression of Women: Bound Up With This System . . . a Driving Force for Revolution
• The Revolutionary Potential of Those Most Oppressed Requires Scientific Leadership
Disc 2
A RADICALLY DIFFERENT AND FAR BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE
WE NEED A REVOLUTION TO OVERCOME ALL OPPRESSIVE DIVISIONS
• We Need a Real Revolution, Not Better Democracy Under This System
• Socialism Is Three Things
• Above All, Socialism Is a Transition to Communism: A New Synthesis
REMIND ME: "WHICH SYSTEM, CAPITALISM OR COMMUNISM, IS THE NIGHTMARE FOR HUMANITY?"
THE ELECTION HUSTLE: "IF THEY DRAW YOU IN, THEY WIN"
• As Bad As Bush Was...Obama Is Even Worse
• Seizing on Contradictions of the System to Prepare for Revolution
• Bourgeois Democratic Intellectuals Thinking Like Serfs Unable to Imagine a Different World
INTERNATIONALISM – THE WHOLE WORLD COMES FIRST
EMANCIPATING HUMANITY...TRANSFORMING CONDITIONS & TRANSFORMING HUMAN NATURE
REVOLUTION IS POSSIBLE: THE STRATEGY FOR REVOLUTION
Disc 3
A REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION...THE ROLE OF YOUTH...& HOW TO WORK TODAY SO THAT THERE IS A REVOLUTIONARY FORCE WHEN THAT TIME COMES
COULD WE REALLY WIN...REALLY?
RESISTING THE BRAINWASH – A RADICAL REVOLT AGAINST A REVOLTING CULTURE
PEOPLE ARE SYSTEMATICALLY MIS-EDUCATED UNDER THIS SYSTEM
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNIST LEADERSHIP – THE ROSETTA STONE WE NEED TO WIN
• Straight Talk on BA
THE CHALLENGE: REVOLUTION – NOTHING LESS!

Go to the BA Speaks:
REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
page.

"You can't change the world if you don't know the BAsics." BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian is a book of quotations and short essays that speaks powerfully to questions of revolution and human emancipation.

Go to the BAsics page.
Free E-book Now Available:
Right-click to download the e-book for the Kindle here. Right-click to download the e-book for other e-readers here. For instructions on downloading and moving files from your computer to your e-reader, click here.

Constitution, Law and Rights View or download PDF here
Order book here

Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy

Order the pamphlet | read online |
listen to MP3:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Richard Pryor Routines... or Why Pigs Are Pigs

by Bob Avakian

Read more

 


There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.

BAsics 1:1

“There will never be a revolutionary movement in this country that doesn’t fully unleash and give expression to the sometimes openly expressed, sometimes expressed in partial ways, sometimes expressed in wrong ways, but deeply, deeply felt desire to be rid of these long centuries of oppression [of Black people]. There’s never gonna be a revolution in this country, and there never should be, that doesn’t make that one key foundation of what it’s all about.”

BAsics 3:19

 

 

Editor’s note: Tyisha Miller was a 19-year-old African-American woman shot dead by Riverside, California police in 1998. Miller had been passed out in her car, resulting from a seizure, when police claimed that she suddenly awoke and had a gun; they fired 23 times at her, hitting her at least 12 times, and murdering her. Bob Avakian addressed this:

“If you can’t handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome. And frankly, if we had state power and we were faced with a similar situation, we would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and you put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people. Fuck all this “serve and protect” bullshit! If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene. They could have and would have found a solution that was much better than this. This is the way the proletariat, when it’s been in power has handled—and would again handle—this kind of thing, valuing the lives of the masses of people. As opposed to the bourgeoisie in power, where the role of their police is to terrorize the masses, including wantonly murdering them, murdering them without provocation, without necessity, because exactly the more arbitrary the terror is, the more broadly it affects the masses. And that’s one of the reasons why they like to engage in, and have as one of their main functions to engage in, wanton and arbitrary terror against the masses of people.”

BAsics 2:16

Bob Avakian, "The police, Black youth and what kind of system is this?"

“Even with very real changes in the situation of Black people, as part of the larger changes in the society (and the world) overall—including a growth of the “middle class” among Black people, an increase in college graduates and people in higher paying and prestigious professions, with a few holding powerful positions within the ruling political structures, even to the extent now of a “Black president”—the situation of Black people, and in particular that of millions and millions who are trapped in the oppressive and highly repressive conditions of the inner city ghettos, remains a very acute and profound contradiction for the American imperialist system as a whole and for its ruling class—something which has the potential to erupt totally out of the framework in which they can contain it.”

BAsics 3:18

 

 

 

 

Bob Avakian, "Yes there‘s a conspiracy, to get the cops off."

“The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.”

BAsics 1:24

 

“Determination decides who makes it out of the ghetto—now there is a tired old cliché, at its worst, on every level. This is like looking at millions of people being put through a meatgrinder and instead of focusing on the fact that the great majority are chewed to pieces, concentrating instead on the few who slip through in one piece and then on top of it all, using this to say that ‘the meatgrinder works’!”

BAsics 1:11

Three Strikes by Bob Avakian

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