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Editors' note: The following is an excerpt from the new work by Bob Avakian, The New Communism. In addition to excerpts already posted on revcom.us, we will be running further excerpts from time to time on both revcom.us and in Revolution newspaper. These excerpts should serve as encouragement and inspiration for people to get into the work as a whole, which is available as a book from Insight Press. A prepublication copy is available on line at revcom.us.
This excerpt comes from the section titled "I. Method and Approach, Communism as a Science."
Excerpt from the section:
The Basic Contradictions and Dynamics of Capitalism
This gets us to the basic point of why anarchy is the principal form of motion, and the driving force, of capitalism and its fundamental contradiction. Now what do we mean by anarchy? There are a lot of different ways that anarchy or anarchism is expressed—some people proclaim themselves anarchists, and we’ll talk about them. But anarchy, basically, means something—a thing or a process—which is not consciously regulated. It might be regulated in some way, but it’s not consciously regulated in the society overall. So let’s talk about anarchy and how it fits into this capitalist system—why anarchy of production is the main driving force of capitalism, and why this driving force of anarchy forces the capitalists to constantly intensify the exploitation of the people who are working as their wage slaves—the proletarians, the people without means of production who have to sell their labor power—and why the capitalists are constantly going from one part of the world to another to find people they can exploit even more ruthlessly. What needs to be understood—and right now is very little understood—is that it’s not just that they’re greedy, but that there are driving compulsions that the capitalists themselves are under, which force them to constantly do these things, including to more intensely and viciously exploit the people who are working under their command.
Now, in the polemic by Raymond Lotta in Demarcations #3, “On the ‘Driving Force of Anarchy’ and the Dynamics of Change,” an important statement of mine is cited, which gets to the heart of this, so I’m going to get into some of this and break it down a bit. It begins:
It is the anarchy of capitalist production which is, in fact, the driving or motive force of this process [of capitalist production], even though the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is an integral part of the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation.
That’s the first sentence of this statement, and let’s stop there for a minute, because there’s a lot packed into that. What does it mean, “the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation”? Well, we talked about what socialized production is: a lot of people working on a production process, not a bunch of individuals each producing things with their own means of production—their own little plot of land, or their own tools, or whatever. So that’s the socialization of production.
But while production under capitalism is carried out in this kind of socialized way, the people who control it and appropriate the products of it, and make the profit from it, are individuals, or corporations, groupings of capitalists. So, thousands and ultimately millions of people work in this process socially, but a small number of people in different aggregates, different groupings of corporations and other forms of capitalism, takes the products as their private property and sells them, accumulating for themselves the profit that comes from doing that. The people who do the work in a socialized way don’t get the product that they work on. That goes to a capitalist (or group of capitalists) that pays them a wage; and then, as previously discussed, they have to go out and buy other things, other commodities. So you don’t work in an auto plant and, at the end of the day, you can say, “Well I’ve worked here three weeks, I think I’ve produced the value of a car, so I’m gonna drive it home.” How many years in prison would you get for that? So, it’s private appropriation on the basis of socialized production. That’s the fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism. But what I quoted, just a minute ago, says that it’s the anarchy of capitalist production which is the driving force of this process. And then that statement goes on to elaborate: “While the exploitation of labor-power is the form by and through which surplus value is created and appropriated, it is the anarchic relations between capitalist producers, and not the mere existence ofpropertyless proletarians or the class contradiction as such, that drives these producers to exploit the working class on an historically more intensive and extensive scale.” And: “This motive force of anarchy is an expression of the fact that the capitalist mode of production represents the full development of commodity production and the law of value.”
What does this mean? Well, I have talked about what commodities are, and how, under capitalism, in general things are produced not to be used directly by the people who produce them, but as things to be exchanged in society (and the world) as a whole, through a whole network of relations that are held together by money (or things which act as a stand-in for money). This is what it means to say that the capitalist mode of production represents the full development of commodity production. OK, so far maybe so good. But what about this law of value? The law of value says this: the value of any product—that is, any commodity, anything produced and exchanged—is equal to the amount of socially necessary labor time to produce that particular commodity. And the reason that anarchy is at the heart of this, is that all these capitalists are engaging in commodity exchanges with each other, as well as commodity exchanges with consumers, and it’s all tied together by this law of value—that’s what regulates it in the ultimate sense, even as it’s a bunch of different capitalists accumulating privately, in competition with each other, in the same field of production or in different fields of production, or in the realm of finance, and so on. But, once again, underneath all this is this socialized process of production.
Now, if it were the case that you just had one big group of capitalists exploiting people, and you didn’t have this whole commodity system, then this one big group of capitalists could regulate things and keep all this madness from happening, where people are thrown out of work, plants are closed down, corporations go from one part of the world to another, with all the consequences of that for people. I mean, look at Detroit. I made this point, in Revolution—Nothing Less!19 that, after the rebellion in Detroit in 1967, all of a sudden the ruling class said, “Ooh we got a big problem here in Detroit, we’ve got all these Black people without jobs, they’re being discriminated against, and brutalized by the police, we better go out and hire a bunch of them, give them a well-paying job in the auto plants”—and they went out and hired thousands of Black people right after the rebellion. Now all those jobs are gone. Detroit is a basket case where large parts of the people in the city can’t even consistently get clean water. Why? Because of the dynamics of capitalism—the unregulated character, the anarchic character of capitalism, where these different aggregates of capitalists, privately appropriating socially produced wealth unto themselves, in different segments, are in competition not only with each other in a particular country but are in competition with capitalists all over the world, and therefore they are constantly having to change the way they produce things, constantly having to shift the arena, or the part of the world in which they’re operating, in order to try to outcompete each other, with the threat of going under if they aren’t more efficient than the others. If they don’t more efficiently exploit people, they will go under, or be reduced to second-class capitalist status, on the verge of going under, even if they’re billion dollar corporations.
When I was a kid, for example, Sears was a big department store. When I was really young they even had the Sears Roebuck catalog: You didn’t order things with your smart phone, you got a catalog and ordered things through the mail from the catalog. Well now, Sears is still around, but it’s not big like Walmart or something, because Walmart came in, found cheaper ways to do things, paying people low wages in the South, then expanding into many parts of the world, particularly the Third World. It’s got operations in places like Bangladesh. The factory that collapsed on the women and killed them in scores, and the fires in the factories there that killed hundreds, were making products for Walmart, and that’s why Walmart could sell them more cheaply than Penney’s or Sears or whatever, and so Penney’s and Sears are in danger of going under—and forget about K-Mart, it’s just kind of limping along.
Or there is the situation with the major supermarket chain A&P, which we now hear is going under. And where is Radio Shack now? Or, to go further back, where is the Kaiser automobile (there is Kaiser Health Care, but where is the car that Kaiser used to make)?
These are just a few examples—many others could be cited. This is an expression of the anarchy of capitalism—it’s not all regulated from one center, it’s all these different capitalists in fierce competition with each other, even sometimes huge groupings of capitalists controlling billions of dollars but always under the threat of going under if they can’t do things more profitably than others who are in the same field, or in some other field, who then buy them up or drive them out of business altogether.
This is the nature of capitalism. Things are constantly changing. I once made this comment to people: You know, things are going along in the economy and then some twit invents an app, and then all of a sudden everything changes. One of these guys coming out of Stanford, or wherever, invents some new device, some new technology, that both makes it possible, and at the same time makes it more and more necessary, to do something through the Internet, more productively and efficiently; and then some of the previous ways of doing things get undermined. Think about Uber and taxis. Uber is undercutting the taxi business, and you had this big thing in France where all the taxi drivers were trying to burn down Uber, because it’s putting all the taxi drivers out of work. Well, this is just an example, again, of the anarchy of capitalism. Somebody comes up with a new innovation for how to organize the production or the distribution of things more efficiently, with greater profit, with less costs of production—and BOOM, the people who had their money in the more traditional way of doing things, even if they’d been doing well for a while, may go under.
These are the basic dynamics of capitalism. For the reasons I’ve been speaking to, there is the continual competition, with even big fish getting eaten up by more efficient “sharks.” And, at the same time, all these capitalists are linked, and ultimately regulated, by the law of value—they’re all tied together by the reality, expressed as the law of value, that the value of things produced is equal to the amount of socially necessary labor time that goes into their production. And this contradiction—capitalists, or groups of capitalists, that exist and operate as separate units of capital, while at the same time they are bound together by, and forced ultimately to proceed on the basis of, the law of value—this is what leads to the anarchy of capitalism, what leads to anarchy being the driving force of capitalism and the key expression of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction, between socialized production and private appropriation. That anarchy is what drives the capitalists to exploit and oppress people in all the ways that we’re all too familiar with, including giving not a damn if you worked for them for 30 years and your children are dependent completely on the wages or salary that you earn—if it’s more profitable to shove you out the door and go somewhere else, that’s just the rules of the game, baby, too bad for you, because it’s do that or die on the part of the capitalists, because they’re in competition with a whole bunch of other capitalists.
As a sharp illustration of this, there was a very good article20 on the revcom.us site about this capitalist who had investments in Bangladesh but who wanted to be a socially-conscious capitalist. This article ran down all the ways in which he tried to do things differently, do them in a way that would not so viciously exploit the women working in the plants that he owned—not have them in such horrific conditions, give them more social benefits—and how he was forced to give that up by this very driving force of anarchy, by the competition from other capitalists doing things in more efficient, more ruthless ways. So even though he was a good-hearted capitalist—and that may sound like an oxymoron (a contradiction in terms), but he was actually a good-hearted capitalist—still, he couldn’t keep up his “kind capitalism” because of the basic dynamics of what drives capitalism.
This is very important to understand, because it shows why you can’t reform this system. You can’t, for example, get capitalists to act more responsibly toward the environment. Look at Obama. He’s the “green president.” Yet he’s opened up all this oil drilling in all these new areas, which is going to heighten the environmental disaster that’s already developing, because the U.S.—that is, the ruling class, the capitalist-imperialists that Obama represents —they are in competition with other capitalists all around the world for sources of oil, and to be able to produce oil more cheaply. And oil is a strategic resource that has everything to do with military power. Militaries run on oil, and the U.S. military is one of the world’s largest, if not the largest, consumer of oil. So, even if Obama wanted to be an “environmental president,” in a real sense, the dynamics of this capitalist system wouldn’t allow him to do that. This is what so many people don’t understand. They constantly are deceived, and deceive themselves, because they don’t understand the fundamental dynamics and “rules” of the system they live under and how that sets the terms for what is, and is not, possible in terms of changing things. Even if something seems to make a lot of sense and to be rational from the point
of view of the needs and interests of humanity as a whole, if it doesn’t fit into those dynamics of capitalism, if it can’t be made to work through the relations and dynamics of capitalism, it won’t happen under this system. And that’s why the situation with the environment is getting worse and worse. Yet, here you have someone like Jared Diamond who wrote this overall very good book, Guns, Germs, and Steel,21 talking about why the world’s the way it is, and why it came to be that in some parts of the world people have a lot more technology and power, while in other parts of the world people have much less and are oppressed by the people who have more, and so on. He has a certain amount of materialism, even some dialectics thrown in there, but then when he looks at the environment,22 he sees the desperate situation with the environment, the tremendous havoc that’s being wreaked on the environment, and the fact that it’s almost reaching a tipping point where it won’t be possible to undo this, and what does he come up with? The idea that we have to go convince the heads of these corporations that it’s in their interests, it’s in accordance with their bottom line, to be more rational about the environment—that’s what he comes up with! He just completely throws out the kind of basic understanding that went into Guns, Germs, and Steel, even with certain limitations in that book. He just deceived himself because, even though he had a certain understanding to a certain level, he didn’t really deeply grasp the basic dynamics of how this system works and how you can’t change it into something else just by talking to people about what would be better for the earth and for the people of the earth, in the abstract. This, once again, gets to the fundamental question of why this system cannot be reformed and why you have to have a completely different system in order to address these social problems of such great magnitude, like the environment, or the oppression of women, or the oppression of different nations and peoples.
Now, it’s not that the contradictions of the economic system—the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, between socialized production and private appropriation, and within that the driving force of anarchy—it’s not that this is the only significant part of reality, the only significant contradiction in this society or in the world as a whole. There are other very important contradictions which have a certain life and a certain dynamic of their own. For example, the oppression of women: As I have pointed out, this arose way before capitalism. And so did the oppression of one group of people by others, in a number of different forms. But at this point, with the system of capitalism, with its tentacles reaching out and ensnaring the whole world within its overall dynamics, all these different contradictions now take place within the fundamental framework of the capitalist system. So while these different social contradictions have to be addressed in their own right, and they have their own dynamics—and you can’t simply say, “If we want to get rid of the oppression of women, we just have to change the economic system,” you have to do a lot more than that—still, in regard to such things as the oppression of women, and even as you’re addressing this in its own right, ultimately what you’re able to do will be determined by what the character of the economic system is, because it’s fundamentally the functioning of the economic system that sets the basic terms, and the basic limits, of what can take place. So even if a problem didn’t arise with the capitalist mode of production, it is now taking place within a world where the dynamics of that economic system fundamentally and ultimately set the stage and the terms within which you are operating.
To summarize this crucial point, we could put it this way: Ultimately, the mode ofproduction sets the foundation and the limits of change, in terms of how you address any social problem, such as the oppression of women, or the oppression of Black people or Latinos, or the contradiction between mental work and manual work, or the situation with the environment, or the situation of immigrants, and so on. While all those things have reality and dynamics in their own right, and aren’t reducible to the economic system, they all take place within the framework and within the fundamental dynamics of that economic system; and that economic system, that mode of production, sets the foundation and the ultimate limits of change in regard to all those social questions. So, if you want to get rid of all these different forms of oppression, you have to address them in their own right, but you also have to fundamentally change the economic system to give you the ability to be able to carry through those changes in fundamental terms. To put it another way: You have to have an economic system that doesn’t prevent you frommaking those changes, and instead not only allows but provides a favorable foundation for making those changes.
19. BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! Bob Avakian Live. Film of a talk given in 2012. For more on this film and to order the DVD set, go to revcom.us. [back]
20. “Everyone's Talkin' About Inequality—Let's Talk About the System Causing It: Lesson from Bangladesh,” Revolution #326, January 12, 2014. Available at revcom.us. [back]
21. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). [back]
22. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2005). [back]
Contents
Publisher's Note
Introduction and Orientation
Foolish Victims of Deceit, and Self-Deceit
Part I. Method and Approach, Communism as a Science
Materialism vs. Idealism Dialectical Materialism
Through Which Mode of Production
The Basic Contradictions and Dynamics of Capitalism
The New Synthesis of Communism
The Basis for Revolution
Epistemology and Morality, Objective Truth and Relativist Nonsense
Self and a “Consumerist” Approach to Ideas
What Is Your Life Going to Be About?—Raising People’s Sights
Part II. Socialism and the Advance to Communism:
A Radically Different Way the World Could Be, A Road to Real Emancipation
The “4 Alls”
Beyond the Narrow Horizon of Bourgeois Right
Socialism as an Economic System and a Political System—And a Transition to Communism
Internationalism
Abundance, Revolution, and the Advance to Communism—A Dialectical Materialist Understanding
The Importance of the “Parachute Point”—Even Now, and Even More With An Actual Revolution
The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America—
Solid Core with a Lot of Elasticity on the Basis of the Solid Core
Emancipators of Humanity
Part III. The Strategic Approach to An Actual Revolution
One Overall Strategic Approach
Hastening While Awaiting
Forces For Revolution
Separation of the Communist Movement from the Labor Movement, Driving Forces for Revolution
National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution
The Strategic Importance of the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women
The United Front under the Leadership of the Proletariat
Youth, Students and the Intelligentsia
Struggling Against Petit Bourgeois Modes of Thinking, While Maintaining the Correct Strategic Orientation
The “Two Maximizings”
The “5 Stops”
The Two Mainstays
Returning to "On the Possibility of Revolution"
Internationalism—Revolutionary Defeatism
Internationalism and an International Dimension
Internationalism—Bringing Forward Another Way Popularizing the Strategy
Fundamental Orientation
Part IV. The Leadership We Need
The Decisive Role of Leadership
A Leading Core of Intellectuals—and the Contradictions Bound Up with This
Another Kind of “Pyramid”
The Cultural Revolution Within the RCP
The Need for Communists to Be Communists
A Fundamentally Antagonistic Relation—and the Crucial Implications of That
Strengthening the Party—Qualitatively as well as Quantitatively
Forms of Revolutionary Organization, and the “Ohio”
Statesmen, and Strategic Commanders
Methods of Leadership, the Science and the “Art” of Leadership
Working Back from “On the Possibility”—
Another Application of “Solid Core with a Lot of Elasticity on the Basis of the Solid Core”
Appendix 1:
The New Synthesis of Communism:
Fundamental Orientation, Method and Approach,
and Core Elements—An Outline
by Bob Avakian
Appendix 2:
Framework and Guidelines for Study and Discussion
The System Finds "No Evidence" that Police Murdered Freddie Gray...
But Reveals a WORLD OF EVIDENCE that THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL!
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The arrest of Freddie Gray
On June 23, this system found Caesar Goodson—one of the police who murdered Freddie Gray in Baltimore—“Not Guilty.” Their prosecutors couldn’t or wouldn’t present evidence, and their judge couldn’t or wouldn’t find evidence that the pig who bashed Freddie Gray’s brutalized and broken body around on a 40 minute plus “rough ride,” committed what this system defines as a crime. No evidence picking up a young healthy man, and leaving him near dead, constituted a crime.
THAT—IN AND OF ITSELF—is evidence ENOUGH that this WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL.
Millions of people saw video of Freddie Gray tortured and brutalized by police. They folded up his thin fragile body like a pretzel. His screams of pain were heard a block away in the Gilmor Homes where Black people are locked down in a prison-like conditions. He was dragged—while witnesses yelled, “he can’t move his legs!”—into a pig paddy wagon. And then for 44 minutes his battered and broken body was bashed into the steel walls of the police truck as he got what every Black person in Baltimore knows is a trademark of the Baltimore pigs—the “rough ride.”
NONE of that made it into Goodson’s trial. What kind of a “justice” system is that? It is a “justice” system that functions to cover up police murder!
The Goodson verdict and everything that led up to it was a damning indictment of the so-called justice system. So... what is the response of this system? Is it that there needs to be a whole reboot of how this is all going down? Did some higher court or authority step in, vowing to fix this?
Just the opposite! Instead of outraged calls for justice, all kinds of voices in the power structure in Baltimore and beyond are calling on the prosecutor to drop the remaining cases. They are demanding that the pig who supervised the murder of Freddie Gray never go to trial and that the ones who bent him like a pretzel should go free without even the kind of farcical trial Goodson (and those before him) had.
Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?
"Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?" is a clip from the film REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion; A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST & BOB AVAKIAN. Watch the entire film of the November 2014 dialogue here.
What does that tell you about what kind of system this is? That instead of outrage at the injustice of the unpunished police murder of a Black man, those with power and influence are saying just let them all walk?!
Facing Outrage... Orchestrating IN-Justice
Police in America shoot and kill unarmed people of color all the time and rarely get charged. (See, for example, “14 Times Cops Walked In 2015 After Shooting People To Death,” Huffington Post, December 29, 2015.) Again: yet MORE EVIDENCE that this is a system of exploitation and oppression backed by violence and terror here—along with their constant unjust terror and wars around the world.
But after Freddie Gray was murdered by police, youth of Baltimore rose up—with fury. They threw a wrench into the gears of injustice. And their actions posed to everyone that this murdering system is wrong, and that it is not all-powerful. When the youth refused to be bullied, insulted, and brutalized by pigs, and lit up the skies of Baltimore, the whole world had to deal with the fact that Freddie Gray’s murder was racist, was unjust, and that there were people who were not gonna take it.
Immediately the system lashed back. They brought out the National Guard. People got hit with vicious charges. Barack Obama himself called the youth “thugs” while saying no such thing about the police who brutally murdered Freddie Gray.
But many people—and not just those who experience police terror every day—weren’t buying the bullshit. Two days after the rebellion, thousands of students marched for justice for Freddie Gray. And that included students from Baltimore’s elite, mostly white Johns Hopkins University—people who, had it not been for the rebellion, might have gone about their lives unaware of, or tuning out, the brutality and oppression faced by people in housing projects that might be just a mile away.
Prominent, respected voices in society called out Obama and refused to condemn the rebellion and stood with the youth. In the midst of the uprising, CNN commentator and Morehouse College Professor Marc Lamont Hill declared that people were right to have “righteous rage, righteous indignation in the face of state violence and extrajudicial killing.”
And here you saw evidence of something else: that revolution is not just necessary but possible. You saw the potential—if there is revolutionary leadership—for those who catch the most hell every day under this system to become the backbone of an actual revolution that could draw in and win support from broad sections of society.
Those who rule over all this could not see “evidence” for convicting the murderers of Freddie Gray. But they could see evidence that the allegiance of sections of people they count on to support their system might fray, unravel, or even turn against them, and that the outrage from wide sections of people was undermining the legitimacy of the rulers’ monopoly on the use of violence that maintains a system of exploitation and oppression.
THAT is why they made a call to bring charges against the murdering police in this case. And that is why from the moment they did so, they orchestrated letting these pigs walk free.
A Criminal Cover-up
There is only one way to make any sense of the way the trial of Goodson was conducted: It has been A CRIMINAL COVER-UP BY A CRIMINAL SYSTEM.
The judge broke the cases down into six separate trials, chopping the crime into pieces and covering up the real story, allowing them to—as Carl Dix put it—let the pigs walk “on the installment plan.” The prosecutors relied on the testimony of pigs—who throughout the first trials, over and over, while supposedly testifying for the prosecution, actually undercut what evidence, if any, the prosecutors presented.
The system put a Black judge—Barry Williams—in front of the trial, and hyped him as someone who prosecuted police brutality when he worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, trying to pimp off the utterly undeserved reputation of the DOJ as opposing police brutality sometimes.
And at the end of this obscene “trial,” the judge ruled there was “no evidence” presented that Goodson “knew or should have known of the acute distress Mr. Gray may have been in at that time” and that there wasn’t even evidence presented that there is such a thing as a “rough ride” or that one occurred.
What kind of system runs a trial where truth and justice don’t even make an appearance in their courts, especially when one of their killers in blue murders a Black man? It is a system that wages unjust wars of terror, that degrades and violently oppresses women, that has declared open season on immigrants, and that is destroying the environment at a manic pace. And it is a system ENFORCED by police like the ones who murdered Freddie Gray, and a court system that gives them a green light to do so.
And it is a system whose TIME IS UP. A system that cannot be made right. That will take REVOLUTION NOTHING LESS.
What does that mean now? It starts here: “The Revolutionary Communist Party IS ORGANIZING NOW TO OVERTHROW THIS SYSTEM AT THE SOONEST POSSIBLE TIME. Preparing to lead an actual revolution to bring about a radically new and better society: the New Socialist Republic in North America.” That Message is on this website. Get into that. Get with that. Get with the Revolution Club.
What’s needed is YOU.
Baltimore, May 2, 2015. Photo: Special to revcom.us/Revolution
Righteous rebellions against reactionary violence—like the Baltimore rebellion against the murder of Freddie Gray a year ago—are positive. It's important to emphasize this basic fact, because a lot of confusion and demoralization are being spread.
Such rebellions give people a sense of their own strength when they stand together. Such rebellions enable people to cast off the shame that the system puts on them for submitting to violence and domination. Such rebellions, when they righteously go up against the violence of the pigs, wake people up all over society. Rebellions against reactionary pig violence, like Baltimore 2015, can win support from others, in all sections of society—they make new alliances possible, and they inspire still others to stand up and many more to actually wake up and ask, for the first time in their lives, “WHY?” Such rebellions open up people’s minds to new possibilities, to the idea that the rulers are not all-powerful, that their system rests on nothing but armed reactionary violence and this violence itself is illegitimate, and that a better world must be sought and fought for.
Such rebellions, if revolutionaries provide the right kind of leadership, can enable people to get better organized...for revolution. They are big opportunities to let people know that there is a leadership, in Bob Avakian and the Party, and a path forward, in the form of the new synthesis of communism he's developed—and a strategy for an actual revolution.
And such rebellions are often the only way that people can get any justice whatsoever. After all, do you think these pigs in Baltimore would have even been indicted without people rising up?
So don’t let them tell you that rebellions against reactionary pig violence do no good. Righteous rebellions do a whole lot of good—if you want to get rid of ALL oppression, if you want to see a revolution, and if you want justice. Conversely, if you don’t rebel against reactionary violence, you won’t get revolution and you won’t get justice either—this we definitely know.
This is what happened with the Baltimore Rebellion of 2015. And this is why the enemy has worked so hard to reverse those lessons. So, of course, they come back at you. Of course, they try to lull you, to wear you down, to trick you, to slander you, to distract you... so that they can mock you and put you “back in your place.” In Baltimore, the police used their power and ties in the street to unleash a “crime wave,” causing confusion and “changing the subject.” They set up these trials and suddenly “forgot how to prosecute”—even though they were able to put other people, those who righteously stood up against the pigs, in prison for long terms.
They’re hitting back and they’re using the fact that they have the state power and we don’t—yet—in order to do it.
And then you have a choice. Carl Dix has called on people to learn from and put into practice the example of Muhammad Ali, who refused to fight in the U.S. Army against the people of Vietnam and did not buckle under when the powers came after him. This is overwhelmingly the most important thing about Ali and what people need to be learning and emulating, including right here and right now around Baltimore and other outrages like Baltimore.
But we should learn something else from Ali, and here we're talking about his time in the boxing ring: he didn't give up. He didn’t quit. He got knocked down, he got slammed against the ropes, he took tremendous punishment, but he always fought to figure out a way to come back harder, to find his opponent’s weaknesses, batter him and then finish him off, as he did to George Foreman, for instance, in Zaire.
As Ali himself said, he didn’t just have the skills, he had the will—and the will was more important. And as Bob Avakian has said, if you are making revolution, you can make and you will make a lot of mistakes—but do NOT make the biggest mistake of all—do not EVER give up.
Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution
It is difficult to overstate the importance of what is being called “Brexit,” the recent vote in Britain (also called the United Kingdom) to leave the European Union (EU).
Bringing Foward Another Way is an edited version of a talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, to a group of Party supporters, in 2006.
The EU is one of the main pillars of the capitalist-imperialist world order and system, and this pillar has been shocked and shaken. While there is nothing good for people in Britain or anywhere else in the vote to leave the EU, it is important to grasp, as Bob Avakian put it, “The essential question is not whether there will be chaos or no chaos, or whether it will end up affecting people everywhere, in one way or another. The question is: What will this all lead to, what will come out of it, what kind of world will emerge out of all this?” (From Bringing Forward Another Way)
Brexit—A Shock to a Key Pillar of the Imperialist World Order
The economic integration of the countries within the EU—including a common market with free flow of goods and people—was closely tied with the U.S.-led military alliance NATO. From the beginning, this was a bloc (group) of imperialist countries very closely aligned with the U.S. and against the rival Soviet Union. From the beginning, EU has been a group of vicious, rapacious exploiters, competing with each other while benefiting from and fighting to keep most of the world in chains, under imperialist domination.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, countries formerly under its domination, mainly in Eastern Europe, were allowed into the EU. The EU went through a major spiral of expansion and growth, overlapping with “globalization”—and became more closely knitted together—economically, politically and with freer flow of people and trade across borders.
While the EU has often and largely been a reliable ally of the U.S. (such as against a resurgent Russia and the past sanctions against Iran), it is also relatively autonomous and competitive to the U.S. within the larger imperialist framework. Britain has had a special place within this—as the U.S.’s most faithful ally in every military aggression from World War 2 to today (the rulers of the two countries call it “the special relationship”). Until now, the British ruling class has used the EU to fight for Britain’s own particular imperialist interests (keeping its own currency but also wanting access to European markets), but also in service of its alliance with the U.S.
Brexit is occurring in the larger context of economic slowdown in the world economy following the 2008 financial crisis, affecting countries like Greece and Spain severely, and the growth of reactionary Islamic fundamentalist jihadist movements and ideology. Within all this instability—in an overall period characterized by what Bob Avakian has called a period of transition with potential for great upheaval (see “The New Situation and the Great Challenges”)—the EU (with Britain a member) has been a stable pillar of the imperialist order and system—allied closely with the U.S.
For these reasons above, Britain’s popular vote to leave the EU has come as giant shock to the stability of the whole world capitalist-imperialist system. No one can predict what the exact consequences of this decision will be. There is a serious possibility that Britain itself will split apart, with Scotland deciding that it is better to split with England and stay in the EU. (Scotland together with England, Wales and part of Ireland has been part of the “United Kingdom” for hundreds of years.) David Cameron, the prime minister who advocated for Britain to “remain” in the EU, has announced he will resign in the face of this vote. There could be other departures and further systemic shocks related to and contributing to the potential unraveling of the EU itself—economically and politically. There are forces in most other countries of the EU similar to those who spearheaded Brexit in Europe, and who have received a boost with this.
While there are many complex political, economic and historical reasons that help explain Brexit, it is the giant turmoil around migration that has powered and colored the Brexit debate and gave it such an ugly xenophobic (hatred of strangers or foreigners) character. In some key countries in the near East, and most especially Syria, round after round of reactionary warfare has left millions desperate to escape the daily horrors of bombardments by the government and its allied forces such as Russia and Iran, or drone attacks from U.S. and its allies, or from bloodthirsty religious fanatics trying impose Sharia law, and risk everything to try to get to Europe. (See “‘Leaked’ Memo Signals Danger of Stepped Up U.S. Aggression: Syria Needs a Real Revolution—Not an Even Worse Reactionary Bloodbath”)
Because of the workings of the imperialist system, there is an ever-widening chasm between the minority of wealthy imperialist states such as the U.S., Britain and the EU and the majority of the world’s people, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This drives hundreds of millions off their lands and into desperate conditions.
The reality for these millions is so dire that even many of those comfortable in their home countries have had to chance the terror of leaky, overcrowded boats. Thousands have died in the Mediterranean trying to enter Europe from Africa and the Middle East.
The same breakneck capitalist development and “globalization” is undermining and transforming traditional forms of society in much of the world, including having a profound impact on the socio-economic reality of Europe itself. A large section of the most oppressed and exploited people in many of the European countries, including Britain, come from or have family origins in countries with large numbers of people who are Muslims.
On a world scale, the further penetration and dislocations caused by the workings of Western capitalism-imperialism and its policies have fueled a conflict with and strengthened the equally outmoded and reactionary Islamic fundamentalism. For more on this, see “Why Is Religious Fundamentalism Growing in Today’s World,” from Away with All Gods! by Bob Avakian, at www.revcom.us.
In a deadly dynamic, each new drone attack leads to new recruits for the Islamic fundamentalists, and each beheading drives more people to seek safety behind imperialist tanks and drones. A section of the youth of Islamic background in Europe has been caught up in reactionary Islamic fundamentalist thinking, and a few among them have committed vicious terrorist attacks such as took place in Paris and Brussels recently.
All of this has been seized upon by virtually all of the traditional political parties (the mainstream Left like Labour in the UK as well as the traditional right-wing parties) and public opinion makers in Europe to whip up all sorts of racist, reactionary sentiments and push through new repressive measures. But even while a reactionary consensus in the ruling circles emerges and hardens about the need to “get tough” and clamp down, restrict civil liberties, “control the borders,” etc., in most every imperialist country, real divides are intensifying among the rulers and the leaders of this system. How to respond to the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism—within the society and around the world? How to respond to the “migrant” or “immigration” problem: with rhetoric and some degree of “inclusiveness” and “tolerance” in a multi-cultural liberal democratic society—or more exclusivist policies to keep migrants out, especially from countries with large numbers of people who are Muslims. The latter was one of the main arguments—explicitly and through innuendo—of those advocating for Brexit, who said that Britain leaving the EU would free it from the overall EU policies and regulations regarding the flow of migrants and people from other EU member countries (including potentially Turkey, which is a prospective member).
In addition to and as part of the whole political spectrum shifting toward a more reactionary position, in many imperialist countries there is the emergence of powerful more-or-less openly fascist political forces with new-found “respectability” as major players. They argue for an outright rejection of anything and everything that is not the traditional British (or German or French...) “identity,” by which they mean Christian, patriarchal and white-supremacist as well as extremely chauvinist. In the U.S., much of this is personified by Donald Trump, and it is no accident that Trump loudly trumpeted the Brexit vote. Economic depression and slowdown, with loss of jobs and lowered living standards and job security among sections of people in these countries, have also led people to blame free trade and immigration for this, including from poorer European countries like Greece and Poland—sentiments ruthlessly exploited by these forces, including those advocating for Brexit.
All of this is putting strain on the old order and a sense that “the center is not holding.” But spontaneously, none of it is fundamentally in the interests of humanity.
What’s Really Needed in the UK—and Around the World!
The same contradictions and forces which led to Brexit—and will continue to influence its aftershocks—also provide a basis for a completely different and liberatory alternative. But for a different future to be ripped out of the tumultuous reality of the present world, there must be real communist leadership, based on the most advanced science and theory of communism.
This is represented by Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism. He has qualitatively resolved the critical contradiction that has existed in communism so far, between its principally scientific character and aspects that ran counter to it.* On this basis and with this method and approach, Bob Avakian (BA) has scientifically summed up the past experiences in communist revolution, its positive achievements and its shortcomings and errors, and re-envisioned the socialist transition to communism.
There is an actual, scientifically based—and radically different and emancipatory—alternative. To the “Brexiteers” and Donald Trump, to the more traditional “mainstream” defenders of the world capitalist order like Hillary Clinton or David Cameron, and to reactionary Islamic jihadist ideology—all of which flow from and are part of the world imperialist system in different and complex ways. There IS a way out of this madness and horror—radically liberating—and it is the only real and viable emancipatory alternative.
Unless and until even a small core of revolutionary communists emerge in the UK on the basis of BA’s new synthesis, even the best people will be continually thrown hither and thither by forces remaining mysterious, and people will continually be forced to pick from poisoned choices, trying to preserve the existing system in one form or another.
On the other hand, it is at times of shocks and turmoil that a correct (scientific, real) view of society can rapidly win followers and become a material force. This is complex, and in the midst of other forces seeking to influence and shape such events towards their interests—and requires science and a revolutionary orientation based on the highest and most fundamental interests of humanity. This is why it is urgently needed that Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism be introduced in a major way into the political life in the UK as well as elsewhere, and that people who want to change the world learn about, take up, wield and organize on the basis of this new synthesis for a new stage of communist revolution.
Updated/corrected on June 30
*See Six Resolutions of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, issued January 1, 2016, and SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION: On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism and the Leadership of Bob Avakian, An Interview with Ardea Skybreak, available online at www.revcom.us. [back]
Britain's decision to leave the European Union represents a major shock, a major crisis, to the entire imperialist world order. This could lead to further tears in the whole economic and political fabric and could result in still greater jolts. No one can predict the consequences.
This is taking place at a time when there is increasingly sharp contention among the rulers of every major imperialist power over how to go forward in the face of huge shifts and changes which are threatening to pull apart their world order. All this is a result of the blind workings of an economic system built on worldwide plunder and oppression and the fallout from the political and military actions the imperialists have taken to preserve that system—including the wars that they have undertaken in Afghanistan and the Middle East in the past 25 years.
At this time, there is no organized force in most of the world with the needed strength to make something good for the masses out of this. Every other answer being offered is either an illusion or would lead only to worse horrors... or both. The most urgent thing is that people be organized around the ONE way out that is actually the way FORWARD. And that is the new synthesis of communism, and the leadership of Bob Avakian.
July 12 Trial Date
Stop the Persecution of Clark and Miles, #ShutDownRikers Protesters
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Clark (left) and Miles (right) with Attorney Kenneth Gilbert.
C. Clark Kissinger and Miles Solay are set for trial on Tuesday, July 12, on charges from the October 2015 protest to #ShutDownRikers, the notorious jail in New York City, as part of Rise Up October. Clark, manager of Revolution Books in New York City, has been a prominent figure of opposition to U.S. capitalism-imperialism beginning in the 1960s and became a supporter of Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Union (the forerunner of the Revolutionary Communist Party) in the early 1970s. Miles is founder of the revolutionary rock band Outernational, which has toured Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. (For more on the October 2015 protest, see “A Shout-out to the Courageous Fighters Who Put Their Bodies on the Line to Shut Down Rikers Island Prison.”)
Organizers of #RiseUpOctober actions and the Stop Mass Incarceration Network are calling on everyone possible to be in court when the jury trial begins. The criminal system running Rikers is working to lock up these two protesters for up to a year on Rikers for demonstrating behind the just demand to shut it down.
What makes the prosecution of these two protesters even more outrageous is that the killing culture of Rikers is being more deeply exposed because of the recent felony convictions of nine Rikers correction officers for beating, or ordering the beating, of Jahmal Lightfoot, who was locked up at Rikers in 2012. Lightfoot testified in April that “basically it was open season for them to do what they wanted” to prisoners at Rikers and that the guards nearly beat him to death.
On any one night, Rikers holds more than 8,000 prisoners. Most are there because they can’t make bail or have been convicted of misdemeanors. As the Stop Mass Incarceration Network says, “Rikers Island is compared to the prison the United States ran in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the site of scandalous prisoner abuse. This is no exaggeration. Decades of deaths in custody at the hands of guards, brutal and widespread sexual violence, solitary confinement for years, denial of medical care, and abuse of children are routine—a part of the genocide of mass incarceration. Of those imprisoned at Rikers on an average day, some 90 percent are Black or Latino.” (For more on Rikers, see Shut Down Rikers Fact Sheet at www.revcom.us.)
In response to an argument by the defense, the prosecution agreed to try Clark and Miles together in one trial. But they have made no offer in the case other than telling the defendants to plead guilty to obstructing government administration, a misdemeanor carrying a possible one-year sentence at Rikers, and on violations of disorderly conduct. The defendants refused to plead to a criminal charge for participating in a nonviolent political protest, and now expect to be tried in front of a jury.
At an April hearing in the case, an assistant DA was overheard complaining that the “protesters” were calling her office to say the charges on Miles and Clark should be dropped, and she was having a hard time getting her work done. The system may not heed the demand to drop the charges, but they are hearing it. More than 700 have signed a message to the DA’s office demanding that the charges be dropped.
Many more people should join in the demands to drop the charges on Clark and Miles and to #ShutDownRikers. Sign the petition here.
A support rally for Clark and Miles will be held Tuesday, June 28 in New York.
Come to July 4 "Imagine a World Without America and Everything It Stands For" Picnics...
Celebrate the REAL Revolution and the Dream of a TRULY Better World
Updated June 29, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
If you can conceive of a world without America—without everything America stands for and everything it does in the world—then you've already taken great strides and begun to get at least a glimpse of a whole new world. If you can envision a world without any imperialism, exploitation, oppression—and the whole philosophy that rationalizes it—a world without division into classes or even different nations, and all the narrow-minded, selfish, outmoded ideas that uphold this; if you can envision all this, then you have the basis for proletarian internationalism. And once you have raised your sights to all this, how could you not feel compelled to take an active part in the world historic struggle to realize it; why would you want to lower your sights to anything less?
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:31
The Revolution Clubs and the BA Everywhere campaign invite you to the kind of July 4 picnic you can really enjoy: a REALLY revolutionary one. There’ll be food, fun and friendship—plus ways to find out about the work and leadership of Bob Avakian, BA, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party... ways to get involved with the Revolution Club, which is working to spread revolution and communism, and fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution... and ways to get with BA Everywhere, which is working to raise big money to get the word on BA out all over.
And guess what? There won’t be a bloody American rag in sight—unless it’s being used to get the coals going!
If you are in—or if you can get to—New York, LA, Chicago or the San Francisco Bay Area, bring your friends and bring your family for a day of fun and celebration that is part of getting to a radically different and far better world.
New York City
2-8 pm
Riverbank State Park, NYC
679 Riverside Drive at 145th Street
(#1 train to 145th, go into entrance of park to picnic area; last stop of M11 and Bx19 buses go directly into the park.)
People are encouraged to bring a dish, non-alcoholic drinks to share, or things to barbecue. Call 917-741-6716 or email baeverywhere@gmail.com for more information and to let organizers know what you are bringing.
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Chicago
2-6 pm (Look for big red flag)
63rd St. Beach (63rd & Lake Shore Dr.)
Picnic. Bring a dessert or side dish to share if you can. Children welcome.
A program begins at 3:30 pm.
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San Francisco Bay Area
3-6 pm
San Pablo Park, Berkeley
2600 Park St. (between Russell and Ward)
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Los Angeles
1 pm
Dockweiler Beach, Los Angeles
where Imperial Highway meets the beach (Imperial Highway & Vista del Mar).
Call 323 463-3500 for directions and more information.
Get the "Land of the Thief, Home of the Slave" Poster Out Everywhere!
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The new revcom.us/Revolution poster featuring the first two quotes from BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian is out just in time to get out broadly in the days leading up to and at the July 4 “Imagine a World Without America and Everything It Stands For” picnics! There is a color as well as a black-and-white version available. Print them out and get them out all over in the neighborhoods and shopping areas, at movie lines, at protests, and wherever people gather. Email to friends and relatives and spread it on social media. Use the poster as part of building for the anti-July 4 picnics in your area.
Case #91: School of the Americas—Training Ground for Mass Murderers and Torturers, 1946-Present
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Bob Avakian has written that one of three things that has “to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better: People have to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this.” (See “3 Things that have to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better.”)
In El Salvador a right-wing government backed by the U.S. suppressed a leftist rebellion in a 12-year war beginning in 1980—killing and torturing more than 70,000 people in a country with a population of about six million. Above: "Death squad" victims in San Salvador, El Salvador, 1981.
In that light, and in that spirit, “American Crime” is a regular feature of revcom.us. Each installment will focus on one of the 100 worst crimes committed by the U.S. rulers—out of countless bloody crimes they have carried out against people around the world, from the founding of the U.S. to the present day.
THE CRIME: Since 1946, the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) has trained military officers from countries all over Latin America. The school’s curriculum includes sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence, and interrogation tactics—including the use of torture, rape, disappearances, assassinations, and mass killings.
CIA and U.S. Army manuals used at the SOA have detailed torture techniques and advocated extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations. A former political prisoner in Paraguay described how a section of these manuals gives “interrogators” instructions on “how to keep electric shock victims alive and responsive” and “recommends dousing the victims’ heads and bodies with salt water, and includes a sketch showing how this ‘treatment’ should be carried out.” Hundreds of thousands of people in Latin America have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced to flee their homes and become refugees by armies and death squads led by military officers trained at the SOA.
March 1976: Argentina's army troops patrol the streets of Buenos Aires after a military coup led by right wing military officers Emilio Massera and others. These military juntas organized and carried out the repression of political dissidents and perceived dissidents and were responsible for the illegal arrests, tortures, killings and/or forced disappearances of an estimated 9,000 to 30,000 people. (AP photo)
New Haitian Army officers pledge their loyalty to Haitian military ruler Lt. Gen. Raoul Cédras at the military academy in Port-au-Prince, November, 1993. (AP photo)
The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:3
Here are just some of the criminals who graduated from the SOA and the crimes they carried out:
Emilio Massera, navy commander in chief, Argentina: Under the military junta led by Massera and others in the late 1970s, 30,000 people were declared “enemies of the state,” held as prisoners, tortured, dropped from airplanes, and murdered in other horrible ways.
Roberto D’Aubuisson, major, El Salvador: Head of the right-wing death squads involved in the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the 1981 massacre of 900 people at El Mozote and many other atrocities.
Efraín Ríos Montt, general, Guatemala: In the 1980s, this Christian fascist headed a military dictatorship, with strong support from the U.S. under Ronald Reagan, that carried out rape, torture, executions, and acts of genocide against tens of thousands of native Mayan people as part of a “scorched earth” campaign to wipe out opposition to the government.
Luis Alonso Discua, general, Honduras: Founder of a death squad known as Battalion 3-16, which was responsible for many disappearances and murders of government opponents.
Raoul Cédras, general, Haiti: Led the 1991 coup which overthrew the elected government headed by Jean-Bertrand Aristide and established a brutal military regime.
This school for mass murderers and torturers was first established in Panama as the U.S. Army Caribbean Training Center. It was renamed the School of the Americas under President Kennedy in 1961 and relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984. The SOA was declared closed in December 2000 but then reopened one month later with a new name—the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC. Since the name switch and other cosmetic changes, graduates have continued to be involved in various coups and attempted coups, including the June 2009 military coup that overthrew Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Out of 25 Colombian graduates from 2001 to 2003, 12 have either been charged with a serious crime or commanded units whose members had reportedly committed multiple extrajudicial executions.
THE CRIMINALS: Every U.S. administration since World War 2 has relied on the School of the Americas to train military officers from Latin America.
More than 65,000 military officers have undergone training at the SOA. In addition to those mentioned above, SOA graduates who have headed military coups and murderous regimes include: Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama; Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina; Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru; Guillermo Rodríguez of Ecuador; and Hugo Banzer Suárez of Bolivia. Officers trained at the SOA have been and are in the command of armies of numerous countries in Latin America that enforce oppressive rule under U.S. domination.
THE ALIBI: The stated purpose of the school is to “promote military professionalism, foster cooperation among the multinational military forces in Latin America, and expand Latin American armed forces’ knowledge of United States customs and traditions.” Defenders of the school argue that any human rights abuses committed by graduates were not because of their training at Fort Benning, but in spite of it. They also emphasize that only a small number of their total graduates have been accused of abuses.
November 2005: Thousands of people gather outside the gates of Fort Benning during the annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the Army's School of the Americas. Each cross has the name of a person killed by U.S.-backed military in Latin America. (AP photo)
THE ACTUAL MOTIVE: U.S. imperialism emerged from World War 2 as the most dominant military, economic, and political power in the world—but it also faced a challenge from the then-socialist Soviet Union, the founding of the People’s Republic of China led by Mao Zedong in 1949, and emerging struggles for national liberation in many other parts of the world. In this context, the School of the Americas played a decisive strategic role—especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, which the U.S. imperialists claimed as their “backyard.” After socialism was defeated and capitalism came back to power in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union developed into an imperialist power. By the 1970s, there was a "Cold War" rivalry between the U.S. and Soviet imperialist superpowers. The Soviets posed a challenge to the U.S. and the West around the world--including through their influence over movements and armed groups fighting U.S.-backed regimes in Central and Latin America and other parts of the world.
The U.S., in turn, countered with even more repression, oppression, and backing for reactionary regimes. In this light, the training of military officers from Latin America was critical, enabling the U.S. to rely on these armed forces to act in the interests of U.S. imperialism. That has meant carrying out genocidal terror and mass murder against insurgencies and civilian populations, bloody coups to overthrow elected governments that were considered a challenge to those U.S. interests, and other crimes. With major shifts in the world in the past several decades, the U.S. rulers now face different challenges to their empire—but maintaining domination over their “backyard” remains crucial to their overall interests.
CIA and U.S. Army manuals used at the School of the Americas (now WHINSEC) have detailed torture techniques and advocated extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations. Shown at left, the cover of "Study Manual: Counter-Intelligence," one of the seven Spanish-language manuals drafted in 1987 by U.S. Army military intelligence officers in Panama.
REPEAT OFFENDERS: Today’s School of the Americas, WHINSEC, continues to play an important role in maintaining U.S. domination over the countries in the Western Hemisphere. Under the pretext of “counter-narcotics” and “anti-terrorism” operations, the U.S. has pushed to establish permanent joint security operations with Mexico (the Merida Initiative) and with the countries of Central America (Central American Regional Security Initiative, or CARSI), giving the U.S. military even more direct influence over regional military forces and the freedom to operate openly in these countries. SOA/WHINSEC has an ongoing role in training military officers from these countries to operate even more closely under the command and control of the U.S. military.
Machete Murders in Bangladesh:
Islamic Fundamentalists' Campaign to Enslave Women and Impose Religious Tyranny
Updated: July 4, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Bob Avakian on the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism: Excerpts from Away With All Gods!
Religious Fundamentalism, Imperialism and "The War on Terror" Read more
Why Is Religious Fundamentalism Growing in Today's World Read more
As we go to press, fundamentalist Islamic jihadists have carried out yet another barbaric crime in Bangladesh. On July 1, Islamist gunmen seized a bakery café in an upscale district of Dhaka, the country’s capital. They held the diners and staff hostage, and then later massacred 20 people, apparently simply because they were from other countries—people from Italy, Japan, India and the U.S. (Two Bangladeshis were also reportedly murdered.) ISIS (the Islamic State) has taken responsibility for this utterly reactionary slaughter.
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Islamic fundamentalists are carrying out a campaign of machete murders in the South Asian country of Bangladesh. Since February 2013, they’ve murdered some 39 people—secular thinkers and writers, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists, religious minorities, foreign aid workers, and others. And the attacks are continuing: Five were murdered in April, four in May, and three (or more) in June. The killers strike with guns and bombs—but mostly with machetes, slashing the back of their victims’ necks, then riding away on motorbikes. On April 23, a university professor was hacked to death and nearly beheaded, and on the 25th a gay rights activist and his friend were butchered. On April 30, a Hindu tailor was cut down—supposedly for criticizing Islam; on June 5, a Christian grocer; two days later, a Hindu priest. A Bangladeshi blogger who’d exposed the abuse of workers and police brutality was driven into hiding for condemning the Islamists’ murder rampage.
These murders began in early 2013 after tens of thousands gathered at Shahbag Square in the nation’s capital Dhaka to demand prosecution of Islamic leaders for war crimes during the 1971 war that led to the founding of Bangladesh, and against the imposition of religion in political and social life. The Islamic fundamentalists’ first victim was Ahmed Rajib Haider, a secular blogger who helped organize the protests.
No one has claimed responsibility for most of these barbaric killings. Global fundamentalist Islamic jihadist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda as well as Bangladeshi Islamists have been blamed, and infighting among Bangladesh’s reactionary ruling parties may well play a part. But this wave of murders is not simply revenge for a protest. It’s part of the Islamic fundamentalists’ response to the deep changes taking place in Bangladesh.
An Enslaving Traditional Order—Rocked by Global Forces
Daily wage laborers wait for work at a market on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, May 2012.
Photo: AP
For centuries, most people in what is now Bangladesh eked out a subsistence existence, mostly farming small plots of land by hand or with a few animals. Women suffered—and still suffer—under the crushing weight of religiously sanctioned patriarchy (male domination). They’re confined to household drudgery and caring for children, unable to leave their immediate neighborhood unless accompanied by a male relative, denied schooling or social life. Even today, nearly two-thirds of Bangladeshi girls are forced into arranged marriages before they’re 18, usually closing off any chance for an education or job. A staggering 87 percent of the country’s married women have been victims of domestic violence, abuse or torment. Nine in 10 rural men still think they have the “right” to beat their wives.
But in recent decades, the workings of global imperialism have created cracks in the traditional order. Two of every three Bangladeshis still live in the countryside, but tens of millions have been driven by landlessness, destitution, and the promise of jobs to seek survival in Bangladesh’s congested megacities (17 million in Dhaka alone). There, cheap labor has turned Bangladesh into a prime destination for global capitalist investment in its rapidly expanding clothing industry.
Three and a half million workers—80 percent of them young women—slave in sweatshops, often for as little as 21 cents an hour, many for 14 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. Most get to work on foot through squalid shanties stinking of excrement. These factories can be death traps: in April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapsed, killing or maiming more than 1,100 people. When workers organize against these horrors, they’re met with threats and beatings.
Yet for women to have jobs outside the home and be paid wages, small as they are (though sometimes more than their husbands earn), can have the effect of undermining traditional patriarchy. The same goes for other changes taking place, including the growth of a middle class, more women going to school, and some professions becoming more “feminized.”
Islamic Fundamentalists: Barbaric Means for Barbaric Ends
Islamic fundamentalism is an all-encompassing ideology and program that aims to reshape every sphere of social, cultural, and political life in order to strictly and brutally reinforce traditional forms of oppression—especially the patriarchal enslavement of women. In the face of big changes shaking the world, they aim to tighten tradition’s chains.
After the 2013 Shahbag Square protests, Hifazat-e-Islam, an association of fundamentalist Islamic groups, issued a 13-point program calling for the imposition of fundamentalist Islam throughout society: adding “Absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah” to the constitution as a fundamental principal of the state; establishing the death penalty for criticizing Islam; ending the “free mixing of men and women”; ending secular education; and making “Islamic education mandatory from primary to higher secondary levels.”
These are the goals driving their machete murders. Those who criticize fundamentalist religion and/or promote science, secularism, and critical thinking (which humanity needs to understand and change the world) are targets for savage executions.
The fundamentalists aim to re-imprison women in the home, enslaved to husbands and male relatives. One way is by supporting the violent male backlash taking place against women. In Bangladesh today, there’s an epidemic of rape, including gang rape.
And, according to one news report, “Every week, somewhere in Bangladesh, a woman’s life is changed forever when she is doused with acid and disfigured.... Victims suffer horrific physical injuries. Not only does their skin burn, but often they are severely disfigured. Acid causes the skin tissue to melt, it attacks the eyes, it dissolves the bones. In certain cases, ears and noses are lost completely.” (“Stolen faces: female victims of Bangladesh acid attacks refuse to be beaten,” News.com, Australia, June 25, 2015) The cause? A spurned advance, a missed dowry payment, or any slight to male privilege. Over the past 17 years, there have been 3,240 reported acid attacks. Yes, at least 3,240!
The Islamic fundamentalists blame the victims for refusing to obey suffocating Islamic strictures. Many women are now being forced—by family or society—to wear the burqa. One study reported, “In the villages, various fatwas sanction the stoning of women to death for the ‘crime’ of asking for justice, for having been raped.” (“Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism in Bangladesh,” Ananya Das)
This is why the Islamists machete-murdered Xulhaz Mannan, who edited Bangladesh’s first LGBT publication and tried to organize the country’s first “Rainbow Rally” for LGBT rights. The oppression of LGBT people has evolved as part of the enforcement of rigid gender roles that enforce patriarchy. The “holy” scriptures of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all demand these strict gender roles and forbid homosexuality on pain of death.
And the fundamentalist Islamists are targeting Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists—terrorizing, marginalizing, and even forcing out non-Muslims from Bangladesh as part of establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state.
Bangladeshi activists at a silent protest against killings in Dhaka, Bangladesh, June 15, 2016. At least 18 people, including atheist bloggers, foreign aid workers and religious minorities, have been killed in attacks in Bangladesh over the last two years.
Photo: AP
Between June 10 and 16, Bangladesh’s pro-imperialist government rounded up some 11,000 people they declared were “suspects” in these attacks. This supposedly secular government had done nothing for years to stop the machete attacks but instead has conciliated with the fundamentalists and condemned critics of Islam, while its police are widely known for arbitrary detentions, disappearances, and torture. Human rights groups and others warn that the mass roundup is an indiscriminate sweep also aimed at other dissidents; only a small percentage of those arrested reportedly belong to any jihadist group. (Analyzing the struggle among Bangladesh’s rulers is beyond the scope of this article.)
Bangladesh: Crying Out for Communist Revolution—Not Barbaric Islamic Fundamentalism
Bangladesh is a concentrated expression of how the world is flying apart and people are looking for answers. But fundamentalist Islamic Jihad is about turning backward to a draconian hell!
Just several decades ago, Maoism was a powerful current in India and Bangladesh, and it represented a real, radical, and liberating alternative to both feudalism and imperialism, with a vision of re-cohering society on an emancipatory basis. And there’s a strong basis for a revolutionary trend to emerge there today—for instance, the Shahbag protests of tens of thousands against the Islamization of society.
Bob Avakian (BA) has put that alternative on a firmer, more scientific foundation, including in its understanding of gender, the centrality of women’s emancipation to the emancipation of humanity, and most of all the need for a scientific approach to be taken up by masses of people. This new synthesis of communism brought forward by BA is the pathway for advancing—in today’s world with all its changes and turmoil—to overcome oppressive social, class, and gender divisions, and get to a much different and far better world on the road to total human emancipation. There is not a moment to lose to spread this pathbreaking advance in human understanding to every corner of the globe.
COMMUNISM: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW STAGE
A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
Available in English, Farsi, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish from RCP Publications, P.O. Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654
$5 + $1 shipping. A draft translation into Arabic is now available online. See all translations here.
Médecins Sans Frontières Takes a Stand Against Vicious EU Policy as Historic Number of Refugees Face Unwelcoming World
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In one day in June, 1,000 refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in unsafe dinghys to reach Europe were rescued at sea by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and Sea Watch humanitarian groups. Photo: MSF
June 20, 2016. A World to Win News Service. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has announced it will refuse future funding from the European Union (EU) and its member states “in opposition to their damaging deterrence policies and intensifying attempts to push people and their suffering away from European shores.”
The humanitarian organisation—whose name (Doctors Without Borders) was originally meant to describe the international reach of its medical work—specifically cited the EU agreement with Turkey under which the EU will pay Turkey to take refugees off its hands. MSF points out that Europe’s refusal to consider applications for refugee status from people who have reached its shores goes against European and international law, ripping up the very principle of the right of asylum established by the International Refugee Convention established in the wake of World War II. This comes at a time when there are more people forcibly displaced by war or persecution worldwide than ever before, even more than during and after that war, more than 65 million people, according to a June 21 UN report.
This situation is not mainly the result of natural catastrophes or even poverty. The majority of the refugees Europe wants to “legislate out of sight,” as MSF puts it, are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, countries whose people are owed a blood debt by the U.S. and the European powers that did everything possible to fuel the war in the first country and invaded and occupied the second and third.
MSF also warned, “Last week the European Commission [the EU central political body] unveiled a new proposal to replicate the EU-Turkey logic across more than 16 countries in Africa and the Middle East. These deals would impose trade and development aid cuts on countries that do not stem migration to Europe or facilitate forcible returns, rewarding those that do. Among these potential partners are Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and Afghanistan—four of the ten refugee countries.”
The same thing is taking place in the U.S., where President Barack Obama, despite the contrast between his “decency” discourse and that of openly fascistic political leaders in his country and Europe, has deported more people than any previous government. It [the U.S.] is on track to deport almost as many as were kicked out of the U.S. during the entire twentieth century—2.5 million since he came to office in 2009. (Figures extrapolated by Tim Rogers on fusion.net from 2013 U.S. Yearbook on Immigration Statistics.) Many of these refugees are from Central American countries the U.S. wrecked just as surely as it wrecked Iraq, Afghanistan and now Syria.
At a Syrian refugee camp in southeastern Turkey, April 2016. AP photo
Even in those countries where the Western powers have not directly intervened lately, massive populations are being displaced by the convulsive workings of the globalized imperialist system, often leaving devastation in its wake, with local political conflicts and wars very much embedded in and driven by this larger economic and political machine devouring humanity.
One direct result of the criminal EU-Turkey deal—truly a pact between gangsters—is that some 8,000 refugees are stranded in Greece, unable to go elsewhere in Europe or hope for asylum in Greece. Greek police have moved them into camps where conditions are so bad they constitute a form of punishment, meant to force families to accept voluntary deportation. Even worse, using Turkey’s agreement to take these people as an excuse, political leaders in countries such as France are openly declaring they have no moral or legal obligation to take any such refugees at all. This is an unprecedented situation in modern Europe, a dropping of the “humanitarian” mask that France and other Europeans have so long used to hide their hideous colonial past and neo-colonial present.
Turkish soldiers guard border as Syrian refugees wait on the Syrian side to cross, June 2015. AP photo
Since under the deal with the EU a cap has been placed on the number of refugees Turkey can be paid to take, in a reverse form of human trafficking on a scale not seen since the slave trade, Turkey has no use for more Syrians. Until now Turkey has kept its border with Syria open. The purpose was to serve as the main conduit for arms and men supplied mainly to various Islamist groups by the Gulf states, the U.S. and Turkey itself. Turkey hoped that it could use its role in the Syrian civil war to emerge as a more powerful regional Islamist power. Now Turkey is building a wall to keep people from fleeing that war.
Once again on June 19, Turkish border guards shot and killed at least eleven Syrians trying to get away from a town held by Daesh (IS) [ISIS] as the U.S.-led coalition stepped up air strikes. In one incident, seven family members, including three children, were killed, along with two other men, and five wounded. Border guards killed two other people in a separate shooting. Turkey has murdered a total of almost 60 people on its borders so far this year, and beaten many others, according to reports from the Syrian National Coalition, an opposition group that cannot be accused of anti-Turkish bias since it is based in Istanbul and supported by Turkey, as well as the U.S. and Europe.
This is a foreseeable result of EU policies, and one that Western countries have chosen to ignore. It drives home the terrible reality described by MSF: “Once again, Europe’s main focus is not how well people will be protected, but on how efficiently they are kept away.”
Although MSF receives most of its budget from private donations, this courageous stand will not endear it to the Western-backed governments that have repeatedly targeted its war zone hospitals and staff in recent months, as have anti-Western Islamist armed groups. Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has rubber-stamped many Western war crimes, has warned about the increasing “detention” and “criminalization” of refugees that threatens the hypocritical humanitarian rhetoric used to pretty up today’s violent world order.
The imperialist powers are increasingly turning to extreme and even military “solutions” to an emergency created by their own system, basically a bursting into the open of the effects of a division of the world into imperialist exporters of capital and the rest of the world their capital feeds on. A “fortress Europe” or U.S. is not sustainable, and no one has proposed any other solution that is remotely as realistic as revolution in as many countries as possible as soon as possible.
Supreme Court Deadlock on Immigration: Unacceptable, Illegitimate, Criminal
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively legitimized vicious and massive attacks upon immigrants. In 2014, the Obama administration issued an order that temporarily put off the possible deportation of more than four million “undocumented” people, mainly immigrants from Mexico and Central America with children who are U.S. citizens. In 2015, a judge in Texas said this order was invalid, and prevented it from being implemented. The 4-4 deadlocked Supreme Court let the judge’s ruling stand.
Bob Avakian, "Why do people come here from all over the world?"
Now, with this ruling, these four million, along with about eight million other “undocumented” people not included in Obama’s order, could be snatched by the authorities at any moment, taken from their families and jobs, and sent hundreds or thousands of miles away. The ruling of the court is a green light for breaking into homes, workplace raids, deportations—for relentless repression on a truly massive scale. Horrors already occurring every day, in every part of the country, will escalate, with a “seal of approval” from the highest court in the country.
This is utterly outrageous, unacceptable, illegitimate, and criminal! People’s right to live, work, and support their families should not be negotiable, or subject to the legal rulings and political disputes of the very system that dominates the countries people come from and has forced them to come to this country in the first place!
Thousands of people are already being deported every week, before this Supreme Court ruling. People like Elena Santiago, who opened the door to her Phoenix home and saw her house surrounded by ICE agents. She was arrested and sent to Mexico with only the shirt on her back and learned her infant daughter and teenage son were going into foster care. Elena’s only “crime”: living and working undocumented in the U.S.
People like Wildin Acosta, who fled horrific violence in Honduras as a teenager and applied for asylum. He was arrested on his way to his high school in North Carolina, held in a detention center and ordered deported because he had supposedly missed a court date. Wildin was one of dozens of teenagers, women, and small children picked up as part of Obama’s Operation Border Guardian that targets Central American mothers and children.
After the Supreme Court ruling, one immigrant woman said that now her “hopes are gone.” Multiply that by millions. Millions of people living in fear of sudden deportation. Millions of people going to work each morning not knowing if they’ll come home at night. Millions of children going to sleep every night worrying that their parents may be taken from them. Millions of people whose hope has been crushed.
This contemptible Supreme Court ruling comes in an escalating atmosphere of ugly, hateful rhetoric—and attacks—against immigrants, whipped into frenzy by the likes of Donald Trump and others.
Obama wants to be seen as the president who is looking out for immigrants. But he has presided over the deportation of more people than any previous president in U.S. history; has poured military, police, and repressive legal forces to an already heavily militarized border; and has maintained “detention centers” (concentration camps) for immigrant children and their mothers. Now, with the ruling, these attacks are going to escalate even further—with horrific consequences for millions.
One indication of the massive, horrific scale of repression the government is preparing for: the same judge who initially ordered the injunction also ordered the federal government to provide the names and personal information of 50,000 people who had supposedly “benefited” from a temporary and partial stay on their deportation. He has since put a hold on this order until August. But it could be lifted then, or applied at a later time, on a broader scale.
This Supreme Court ruling is an illegitimate decision from an illegitimate system.
Millions of immigrants and others have waged courageous and fierce struggles for several years—to stop raids and deportations, to end the break-up of families, and to be recognized as full human beings. Needed now is even more fierce, determined defiance and resistance to the renewed assaults on immigrants, from everyone who opposes oppression and injustice.
The deadlock in the Supreme Court is itself reflective of larger divides among the powers that be on how to approach immigration overall and the millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. already. There are those like Obama, Clinton, and others with their rhetoric of “immigration is not something to fear”—even while they continue to heartlessly deport millions, separating loved ones and families and imprisoning and deporting refugee children from Central America who have risked their lives to escape horrific conditions at home. These conditions—of extreme poverty and violence—are themselves the result of the workings of this system of capitalism-imperialism and conscious U.S. policies over decades. See Bob Avakian speaking on “Why do people come here from all around the world?”
Then there are those like Trump and others who openly demonize Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” call for mass deportations of all estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and incite hatred against immigrants, including and especially those of Muslim descent.
Even with these divisions, all the rulers of the U.S., both Democrat and Republican, are united on the need for some fundamental things—vicious repression of immigrants and massive deportations, and an insanely militarized border with Mexico to confront what they see as their “problem” of immigration. Other than more horrors, they—this system and its leaders—have NO ANSWER. The REVOLUTION does! There isn’t an “immigration problem”—there is a capitalism-imperialism problem!
Updated August 1, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Scroll down for earlier entries.
July 20, 2016. Charles Kinsey, a behavior therapist was bringing back a young autistic man who had wandered away from his group home. Cops arrive, point their guns at Kinsey and order him to lie on his back with his hands up. Kinsey complies. The autistic man is sitting next to him and Kinsey shouts, “All he has is a toy truck. A toy truck. I am a behavior therapist at a group home,” and, “There is no need for firearms.” The pigs shoot Kinsey—who is still on his back and hands in the air—in the leg, then rush over and handcuff both Kinsey and the young autistic man. What kind of sick, depraved racist shoots a Black man who lies down on his back, puts his hands up in the air and makes it very clear that he is a professional, caring for an autistic young man?
July 28, 2016. 18-year-old Paul O’Neal is shot in the back by Chicago cops after he drives away from a traffic stop. Police admit no gun was found at the scene and that the shooting violates their own regulations—that prohibit officers from shooting at moving vehicles if no weapons are being used against police.
What kind of murderous group armed by the U.S. government stops Black people all the time for “routine traffic stops,” and then ends up killing them in cold blood, many times, shooting them in the back?
July 25, 2016. People were hanging out together in the Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Watts. LAPD came on the scene and people began to run away. The cops shot and killed 18-year-old Richard Risher who was unarmed and running away. Risher stumbled after he was shot, the police kept shooting, and then they came over and kicked and spit on Risher as he lay dying. After this, the police sealed off the entire neighborhood and forced whole families to stand out in the street while they went through their homes, supposedly searching for a “shooter.”
What kind of monsters with badges and guns—chase a young man who is unarmed, shoot at him, then when he falls down, keep shooting and then as he’s dying come over and kick and spit on him?
What kind? Here’s an excerpt of how the Black Panther Party once defined a pig:
What is a pig? A low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of people:..a foul, depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack.
...And What Should They Do?
Here’s what Bob Avakian said in 2002, responding to the murder by police of the unarmed and unconscious young woman Tyisha Miller in Riverside, California:
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
Earlier entries:
June 2016. At least 14
Oakland cops are under investigation for having sex with an
18-year-old woman; three of them allegedly had sex with her when she
was 17. The woman, the daughter of police dispatchers, says she had
sex with the officers in exchange for money and protection. Some of
the cops sent obscene, sexually explicit photos to the woman’s
phone. Other police departments are also implicated: The woman says
she got “referrals” from cops for other pigs from nearby
cities as well as from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department.
There is evidence the Oakland police chief knew this was happening
but looked the other way.
What kind of sick pack
of animals use their position of force and power to prey on a young
woman—passing her around and abusing her in what amounts to
long-term serial gang rape?
Squeals and Oinks from NYPD Commissioner Bratton in New York City and the State Government of Louisiana:
On May 25, after yet another NYPD cop was caught on video brutalizing someone in Harlem and pointing his gun at and then punching and arresting the videographer(!), NYC head pig Bill Bratton said: "When you interfere with a police officer making a lawful arrest, you with your cameras attempt to really get into it ... then you are creating circumstances that are dangerous for the public and dangerous for the police officers.... This has become a very serious—I would almost describe it as an epidemic in this country."
What kind of depraved individual would preside over an institution whose members are repeatedly exposed brutalizing and murdering Black and Brown people with impunity and immunity and then say those who videotape this brutality and murder are the problem—and even the reason people get beaten and killed?
The Louisiana state government just passed and signed into law legislation that puts police on the list of those protected under state hate crime laws supposedly designed to protect victims of acts of conscious prejudice because of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity. Those who back the Louisiana law claim law enforcement nationwide is under attack.
Reality: The FBI documents 41 on-duty police were killed in 2015, one of the lowest numbers in decades. For the same year, the Guardian newspaper documented at least 1,000 people killed by police in the U.S. nationwide, nearly 100 unarmed. The police who commit these murders are routinely defended and even praised as heroes.
What kind of vile governing body presiding over what kind of sick system would unleash and defend racist murdering pigs, then make up a lie and pass legislation that claims the police are the victims?
Good riddance to rotten pork. Police Chief Greg Suhr, pictured above, was driven from office this week by mass outrage and struggle in San Francisco. Suhr had risen through porcine ranks by personally supervising the April 6, 1996 murder of Mark Garcia.
Racist vigilante George Zimmerman is auctioning off the gun he used to murder Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman says proceeds from the sale will be used to “fight [Black Lives Matter] violence against Law Enforcement officers.” Last year Zimmerman tweeted “Cops lives matter, black slime doesnt [sic].”
What kind of sick motherfucker tries to sell the weapon he used to murder an unarmed young Black man, portrays the epidemic of police terror and murder against Black people as “violence against law enforcement officers,” openly dehumanizes Black people and brays that their lives do not matter?
Steve Loomis is the head of the Cleveland Police Union. He represented the cops who murdered 12-year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun—in a playground. Now he’s demanding Tamir’s family use money from their wrongful death lawsuit settlement to “educate” youth about how to play with toy guns.
What kind of a heartless motherfucker has the gall to back child murderers, blame the totally innocent child for his own death, and then demand his heartbroken parents pay up or be blamed when police murder other kids with toy guns?
Tom Angel, the No. 2 cop in Burbank, California, and then the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s chief of staff, was hired to reform departments riddled with police brutality, racism, and sexual harassment. All that time he was emailing racist, degrading “jokes” mocking Black people, Latinos, Muslims, women, and homeless people: “I took my Biology exam last Friday, I was asked to name two things commonly found in cells. Apparently ‘Blacks’ and ‘Mexicans’ were NOT the correct answers.”
What kind of sick, depraved animal pretends to be cleaning out racism and sexism but all the while spreading vile racist, chauvinist, sexist contempt for the people, unleashing his minions to wreck mayhem on those his department claims to “serve and protect”?
San Francisco cops Jason Lai, Curtis Liu, and Keith Ybarreta sent racist texts calling people of color “barbarians,” “cockroaches,” and “a pack of wild animals on the loose,” and containing dehumanizing anti-woman and anti-gay insults. A few: “I hate that beaner, but I think that nig is worse.” “Indian people are disgusting.” “Burn down walgreens and kill the bums.”
What kind of vile scumbags heap contempt and abuse—even wish for death—on those over whom they hold the power of life and death?
Chicago: Why Does This Serial Killer in Blue Still Walk the Streets?
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
Flint Farmer
Darius Pinex
Chicago pig Gildardo Sierra murdered two people in a space of months and shot a teenager in a separate incident. The police review authority and the state’s attorney cleared Sierra and his pig partner, Raul Mosqueda. After murdering two people, Sierra was rewarded by getting a CPD “desk job”—a $70,000/year job at the 911 call center. He has been allowed to keep his pension.
The city paid out millions to the family of one Sierra victim, Flint Farmer, and then defended the pig and his partner in a civil suit brought by Gloria Pinex over the murder of her son, Darius Pinex. The pigs lied on the stand to cover up the fact that they had absolutely no reason to even stop Darius in the first place. The city’s attorney deliberately hid evidence that proved that the pigs were lying to cover up their murder.
What happened to Gildardo Sierra, who murdered Farmer and Pinex, and to Raul Mosqueda, who unloaded his gun on Pinex? Absolutely FUCKING NOTHING! Both are still walking the street and face NO criminal charges for murder, perjury, aiding and abetting murder.
Just what has been dragged into light in the last month is enough to indict hundreds of cops on everything from simple obstruction of justice to murder. Yet there is not ONE indictment.
We cannot allow these pigs to continue to murder with impunity. The Revolution Club of Chicago and Pinex family members are calling for a protest at the Englewood police station that sent this marauding pig out to gun people down over and over, Thursday, June 30, 1 pm at 63rd and Loomis, Chicago. Everyone who wants to see justice done should be there to demand that Sierra and Mosqueda be indicted NOW. The whole damn system is guilty as hell, and we need to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time.
The Supreme Court has overturned the horrendous Texas anti-abortion law HB2, rejecting its anti-abortion restrictions as an “undue burden” on women's ability to obtain an abortion. This means that the remaining abortion clinics in Texas will be able to continue providing abortions to women, and this is a blow against a whole spate of similar anti-abortion restrictions which have been passed across the country. This is good news because, as Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has pointed out, denying women the right to abortion and forcing women to have children against their will is a form of enslaving women to the dictates of an oppressive male supremacist, patriarchal system.
However, today's victory does NOT mark an end to the war on women. The fact that such an outrageous and anti-woman law could be passed in the first place—with over twenty abortion clinics forced to close during the three years while this law worked its way through the courts—is but one indication of the depth of anti-abortion and anti-woman fanaticism that pervades this country. Many women had their lives destroyed by the lack of abortion access due to these clinic closures, and, even with this positive ruling, it will be very difficult for many of these clinics to reopen. Across this country, women face harassment, shaming and terror as they enter abortion clinics. Just months ago, an anti-abortion gunman murdered three and injured others at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado. Patriarchy is woven into the fabric and foundation of American society and it cannot be uprooted and ended until this system is overthrown through an actual revolution.
www.revcom.us wants to say a huge thank you to all the fighters on the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride—all the brave women and men from all over the country who dropped everything to travel to Texas in the summer of 2014 to build mass resistance to the Texas law HB2 which threatened to shut down all but six clinics in the entire state. These courageous fighters faced down threats, arrests and brutality to boldly put forward their stand of Abortion on Demand Without Apology! As the war on women mounted around the country with hundreds of restrictions on abortion being passed in state after state, they reached out broadly and challenged people to take a stand. They put their own lives on the line to fight against this war on women, to fight for the basic right for women not to be enslaved by enforced motherhood, and inspired others to stand up and draw the line. As we celebrate the victory of the overturning of the provisions in this law which would have succeeded in forcing over a dozen clinics to close, everyone should learn from and be inspired by the powerful example of the brave resisters of the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride and the contribution their struggle made to the battle to defend abortion rights.
It is very significant that thousands of people stood up against HB2 when it was first passed, that doctors and staff persevered in the face of it, that lawyers fought against it, and that StopPatriarchy.org and others mobilized resistance, including sustaining arrests for non-violent direct action in Texas, to oppose this law. Undoubtedly this determination played a role in the Supreme Court's ruling today. Now, this same spirit of defiance and mass resistance must continue and go to new heights—to beat back every unjust and illegitimate restriction on abortion, to put an end to all the shaming, harassment and terror carried out against abortion clinics, to break all the chains of tradition and patriarchy that bind women. And this resistance must fuel and be part of preparing for an actual revolution at the soonest possible time.
Any system that would allow the level of restriction and shame against abortion that takes place in this country—even if the most absurd extremes to which this has been taken have been blocked—is completelyillegitimate. The solution is not to campaign for who will preside over this illegitimate system as president, or who will nominate judges to the Supreme Court that renders these decisions.
The solution is to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time through an actual revolution and to go on to build a radically different and far better system and world—one that breaks all the chains that bind women as part of the larger battle to emancipate all of humanity. This is what the Revolutionary Communist Party, led by Bob Avakian, is actively preparing for now. Dig seriously into this revolution at www.revcom.us, and into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic of North America. And, right now, as part of getting ready for an actual revolution—join with this Party now to wage mass political resistance against the vicious war on women.
FETUSES ARE NOT BABIES!
ABORTION IS NOT MURDER!
WOMEN ARE NOT INCUBATORS!
FORCED MOTHERHOOD IS FEMALE ENSLAVEMENT
BREAK THE CHAINS! UNLEASH THE FURY OF WOMEN AS A MIGHTY FORCE FOR REVOLUTION!
HELL NO! to the Outrageous Verdict in Case of One of the Cops Who Murdered Freddie Gray
June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Revolution Club, Los Angeles Photo: special to revcom.us
The
Revolution Club in LA took up the call to take to the streets and say
HELL NO! to the outrageous verdict that let yet another cop on trial
for murdering Freddie Gray walk totally free. The Revolution Club
went out with the RCP Central Committee’s message, “Time
to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution,” on a busy corner in
South Central L.A., just a few blocks from where 2 weeks earlier the
police killed Keith Bursey, a 31-year-old Black man. It was rush hour
and many people who heard the agitation or saw the signs with the
message that it’s time to get organized for an actual
revolution, raised their fists and honked their horns.
A
Black woman getting on the bus stopped to get on the bullhorn and
said that Black and Brown people just want to be treated like human
beings. A local news station came and took video footage. The
Revolution Club then got in formation and along with other activists
who’d come out, and we marched a few blocks to where there is a
candle memorial for Keith Bursey. We chanted “Justice for
Freddie Gray, Put those killer cops away,” “What’s
the problem? The whole damn system! What’s the solution?
Revolution!” along with the “Mighty Mighty RevComs”
chant.
The
Revolution Club then posted up on the corner where Keith Bursey was
killed and continued doing agitation. One young Black man swung his
van into the parking lot and said he wanted to come out with us the
next time we are out but that he couldn’t stay. We made an
appointment to meet up this coming week and get more deeply into this
revolution and its leadership. Many people driving by filmed the
Revolution Club and were paying attention to the agitation calling
out this outrageous verdict and this modern-day lynching of Freddie
Gray and this system of capitalism-imperialism for carrying out this
kind of brutality on the daily and boldly putting forward what's in
the message "Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution."
In
the photo we’re sending with this piece, just behind the
Revolution Club are candles and messages dedicated to Keith Bursey’s
life. Two Black women came up to us—one filmed us for 20
minutes and kept saying “that’s right!” And her
friend said, “They tell us we are killing each other….
Well, what the police have is a license to kill.”
Chicago: Our Revolution Club decided to do an action giving commuters the opportunity to walk on the red, white and blue rag to build for the July 4th picnic. We got flags at Home Depot and ended up stapling 2 together in order to have a large enough swath to almost cover the entire ground where people exited from the turnstiles at a busy south side El train stop. We wrote some of the crimes carried out under the flag in black marker on the flags. We also made a 4x6 enlargement of the centerfold in the current paper “Land of the Thief and Home of the Slave”. This was almost too large to transport once we put it on foam core. 3x5 might have been better.
We knew what we were doing was legal (the exit from the trains is considered public property and it is legal to walk on the flag) but we expected to get flack from the police. So we printed out our legal rights and got a friend to dress up and be the person to interface with the authorities. This turned out to be a great idea. At times there were up to a dozen cops and various Chicago Transit Authority officials trying to figure out how to shut us down. Our friend was kept very busy the entire time we were there and the pigs never succeeded in shutting us down.
Two Revolution Club members in uniform stood on the ends of the flag to hold it in place and so the pigs couldn’t call it a safety hazard. Others held the huge “Land of the Thief and Home of the Slave” sign while one person loudly agitated. Others passed out pluggers for the picnic and the “Time to Get Organized for an Actual Revolution” proclamation.
It was a wild scene. Some people really welcomed what we were doing, walked on the flag and gave us information about how to stay in touch. Some stayed and watched for a long time. Many took video and photos. Others hated it and told us so, although one woman after doing this returned some time later to apologize saying she hadn’t understood what we were all about. She asked for extra pluggers and proclamations to take to friends and family. The heavy police presence attracted people’s attention and more than a few seemed to enjoy taking the materials, or giving us their contact information right in the face of the pigs. There was also a significant number of people that tried to sort of ignore the whole thing as they pushed their way out of the turnstiles and headed home from work. At the end we marched out of the station doing our “we are the revcoms the mighty mighty revcoms” chant.
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If you can conceive of a world without America—without everything America stands for and everything it does in the world—then you've already taken great strides and begun to get at least a glimpse of a whole new world. If you can envision a world without any imperialism, exploitation, oppression—and the whole philosophy that rationalizes it—a world without division into classes or even different nations, and all the narrow-minded, selfish, outmoded ideas that uphold this; if you can envision all this, then you have the basis for proletarian internationalism. And once you have raised your sights to all this, how could you not feel compelled to take an active part in the world historic struggle to realize it; why would you want to lower your sights to anything less?
CIA and U.S. Army manuals used at the School of the Americas (now WHINSEC) have detailed torture techniques and advocated extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations. Shown at left, the cover of "Study Manual: Counter-Intelligence," one of the seven Spanish-language manuals drafted in 1987 by U.S. Army military intelligence officers in Panama.
Flint Farmer
