Please note: this page is intended for quick printing of the entire
issue. Some of the links may not work when clicked, and some images may be missing.
Please go to the article's permalink if you require working links and images.
Never has the need for revolution been more acutely posed than it is now. Today, the fabric of society is being pulled apart all over the world. The ruling classes find themselves in crisis. In the face of this, the Trump/Pence regime has come to power in the U.S. to impose a fascist regime. They are putting into place a violent reinforcement of white supremacy and misogyny in all its forms, with genocidal implications; a brutally aggressive “America First” national chauvinism; and the demonization and severe repression of those who would defy this.
Meanwhile, this whole capitalist-imperialist system wreaks wanton destruction on the planet. This destruction, along with economic plunder of the world and wars for empire, has driven tens of millions of people out of their homelands to seek refuge. Once out, they face death on the high seas or in the desert, because the imperialists have locked down their borders; those who escape are cruelly confined behind stockades and razor wire. In every imperialist country, with the U.S. leading the way, immigrants are demonized and persecuted, and whole peoples are denied their basic humanity and their rights. Further: one half of humanity—women—are daily degraded, exploited, mocked, enslaved, raped, and murdered, everywhere on this planet. Within the U.S., Black and Latino people continue to be brutalized and murdered by police and incarcerated in record numbers—with threats of far worse in store. On top of all this, the Trump/Pence regime now threatens war and brandishes nuclear destruction, intentionally strutting like gangsters and madmen as they do.
BUT—there IS an answer to this madness. There is a way out and a way forward: Bob Avakian’s New Synthesis of Communism gives people the way to understand the world, and transform it through revolution. Bob Avakian—BA—has drawn from the breakthroughs and experience of past revolutions, as well as other forms of human endeavor, and put revolutionary communism on a more scientific foundation. BA has developed a scientific approach to the world that everyone can take up; the strategy that can actually overthrow these imperialists; and the blueprint, once power has been won, for a revolutionary society on the road to ending all oppression, exploitation, and destructive conflicts between human beings. As BA himself has written:
There is an urgent need for this new synthesis to be taken up, broadly, in this society and in the world as a whole: everywhere people are questioning why things are the way they are, and whether a different world is possible; everywhere people are talking about “revolution” but have no real understanding of what revolution means, no scientific approach to analyzing and dealing with what they are up against and what needs to be done; everywhere people are rising up in rebellion but are hemmed in, let down and left to the mercy of murderous oppressors, or misled onto paths which only reinforce, often with barbaric brutality, the enslaving chains of tradition; everywhere people need a way out of their desperate conditions, but do not see the source of their suffering and the path forward out of the darkness.
On the basis of this new communism, the movement for revolution fights the power, and transforms the people, for revolution. This means joining with, leading, and organizing masses of people to fight back against the attacks of this system. It means struggling with all the backward values, ideas, and ways of thinking that reinforce and lead back into this system and struggling for those ideas that contribute to human emancipation; without such struggle, there will never be a revolution. The key to all this is BA—bringing his method and approach, his work, and the many, many ways he provides leadership for the battles right now into the center of all this movement does.
This activity is urgent, and aimed at a specific goal. Right now, today: Prepare the ground, prepare the people, prepare the vanguard for revolution—get ready for the time when millions can be led to fight, all-out, with a real chance to win. Follow the leadership of Bob Avakian in all this, and get organized into the Revolutionary Communist Party to carry it through.
Rarely if ever has there been such a direct danger to even the continued existence of humanity as there is today; yet, on the basis of taking up the revolutionary way forward, the potential is there to make a world truly fit for human beings. The path has been forged to take up the struggle to make revolution, all over the world, and to emancipate all of humanity. Now is the time for YOU to take up this great cause. Where revolutionary forces do not yet exist, take up the new communism and organize such forces; where such revolutionary forces have taken up the new communism, join with them and strengthen them. The time is now; the situation is urgent; the struggle must be intensified.
There Is a Way Out of This Madness
Get Into Bob Avakian’s New Synthesis of Communism
We Don’t Accept Slavery in Any Form
Emancipate All of Humanity
Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution
In the Name of Humanity, Drive Out the Trump/Pence Fascist Regime
Stop the Persecution of Immigrants
Stop U.S. Imperialist War and Aggression All Over the Planet
Stop the Genocidal Attacks on Black and Latino People
Stop the Oppression and Degradation of Women
Stop the Capitalist-Imperialist Plunder of the Planet
We reject the putrid thinking, values, and culture of this system
Bring Forward a New, Vibrant Revolutionary Culture
To the angry and impatient youth... to those living in the shadows... to those who are in fear every day of being torn from your loved ones... to all those who are sickened by these endless outrages... to anyone and everyone who is determined to stand up and fight...
It’s time to get organized for an ACTUAL revolution. And this revolution needs you.
A whole different world is possible—a world without borders, a world where no human being is considered “illegal,” a world without the division into a handful of bloodthirsty imperialist powers and the vast majority of humanity locked into the oppressed nations.
The only thing standing in the way is this system of capitalism-imperialism. This system is driven by the anarchic mad-dash competition between these brutal powers for more profitable exploitation of the people and the planet. It forces people to flee their homes from poverty-stricken conditions and imperialist destruction. Then it callously demonizes and persecutes them, tearing families apart for trying to escape the misery this system itself causes.
This system cannot be reformed. And it promises far worse: the consolidation of a fascist America, with that monstrous ghoul Donald Trump threatening nuclear war on the world and even worse environmental devastation of floods, droughts, mass starvation... all still within a system that cannot do anything to stop this preventable suffering and death.
This system needs to be overthrown through an ACTUAL revolution to bring into being a radically different, and far better, world. This revolution is not just necessary, it is possible. And there is a force that is getting organized and working to make this revolution at the earliest possible time. A force you need to link up with and a force you need to join.
Right now, we urgently have to wage the political struggle—uniting people from many different perspectives—to drive this fascist Trump/Pence regime from power. Before fascism is able to fully consolidate, we have to lead millions into the streets with the determination: No! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Live in a Fascist America!
As we do, we need to be on a mission to spread the word, to let people know that we have the leadership, the science, the strategy and program, and the basis for organizing people for an actual, emancipating revolution. We have Bob Avakian (BA), the leader of this revolution and the architect of a new framework for revolution, the new synthesis of communism. We have the Party led by BA, the Revolutionary Communist Party, with this new synthesis as its scientific basis to build for revolution. We have the Revolution Clubs, where people can take part in and powerfully represent for the revolution in an organized way, as they learn more about the revolution and advance toward joining the Party. We have the website of the Party, revcom.us, and its newspaper Revolution, which sharply expose the crimes of this system, scientifically analyze why it cannot be reformed, and give guidance and direction for people to work in a unified way for revolution. We have the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by BA and adopted by the Party’s Central Committee, which provides a sweeping and concrete vision and “blueprint” for a radically new and emancipating society. People in the inner cities, and in the prisons, students, scholars, artists, lawyers and other professionals, youth in the suburbs and rural areas—people in all parts of society—need to know about this and seriously take it up.
Go torevcom.us every day and join the Revolution Club.
The danger of global environmental disaster due to climate change has become clearer and clearer in recent years. Then came the Trump/Pence regime—and in their first 100 days, they’ve put this rush toward environmental catastrophe into overdrive. Read more
An Invitation
By Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
Let's go on a crucial journey together—full of unity against oppression and lively struggle about the source of the problem and the solution. Pursue your own convictions—that the outrages that move you are intolerable—to their logical conclusion, and be determined not to stop until those outrages have been eliminated. And if this, as well as learning about other outrages, and ideas about how this all fits together and flows from a common source—and how it could all be ended, and something much better brought into being—leads in the direction of seeing not only the need for bold and determined resistance, but also the need for revolution and ultimately communism, then don't turn away from that because it moves you beyond your comfort zone, challenges what had been your cherished beliefs, or because of prejudices and slanders. Instead, actively seek to learn more about this revolution and its goal of communism and to determine whether it is in fact the necessary, and possible, solution. And then act accordingly.
This Revolution special issue focuses on the environmental emergency that now faces humanity and Earth's ecosystems. In this issue we show:
the dimensions of the emergency...
the source of its causes in the capitalist system, and the impossibility of that system solving this crisis...
a way out and way forward for humanity—a revolutionary society in which we could actually live as custodians of nature, rather than as its plunderers.
» Refuse Fascism—made up of people coming from a diversity of perspectives who recognize that the Trump/Pence regime is fascist, that it poses a catastrophic danger to all of humanity, and that it is our responsibility to mobilize millions to drive it from power.
We invite you to further explore...
Constitution for the New Socialist
Republic in North America
Authored by Bob Avakian, and adopted by the Central Committee of the RCP
To all the people agonizing over climate change and the threat it poses to humanity and other species and ecosystems on the planet:
The fascist regime heading the U.S. is placing the world in even greater danger of environmental catastrophe through climate change. For this—and many other reasons—the Trump/Pence regime must be stopped and driven from power, as soon as possible. But the answer is not a “saner” or “less extreme” form of this same system—the system of capitalism-imperialism. The climate crisis cannot be tackled in any real way as long as this system reigns. It’s a system where the “bottom line” criteria for everything is maximum profits... where capitalists must play by the “rules of the game”—expand or die—no matter the consequences to life on this planet.
The world does not have to be this way. There is a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world—the new communism brought forward by Bob Avakian (BA). The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by BA, provides a framework and blueprint for a revolutionary power that, as it gives due emphasis to meeting the material, intellectual, and cultural needs of the people, aims “to contribute all it can to solving this environmental crisis and, to the greatest degree possible, reversing its terrible and manifold effects, and to ushering in a new era in which human beings and their society can truly be fit caretakers of the earth.”
As you fight against the super-predators in power who are accelerating the global environmental emergency, seriously check out the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America and the movement for an actual revolution aiming to bring this new society into being. And if you become convinced of the need for revolution, have the courage of your convictions and get with this.
Revcom.us/Revolution newspaper brings alive a scientific analysis of major events in society and the world—why they are happening, how different events and developments relate to each other, how all this relates to the system we live under, where people’s interests lie in relation to all this, how revolution is in fact the solution to all this and what the goals of that revolution are, how different viewpoints and programs relate, positively or negatively, to the revolution that is needed, and how people can move, and are moving, to build toward that revolution. There’s something new here every day. Bookmark us and sign up for a free e-sub.
Bob Avakian (BA) is the architect for a whole new framework for human emancipation, the new synthesis of communism. This new synthesis is based on more than 40 years of revolutionary work critically analyzing and drawing from past revolutionary experience and theory, and a broad range of human activity and thought. It is a continuation of, but also represents a qualitative leap beyond, and in some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed. Bob Avakian has been the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA since its founding in 1975. Find out more.
Revolutionary Communist Party, USA is the vanguard party for an actual revolution. Find out more.
Even as you explore what this revolution is about, find out WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW.
Fascism in America
Could It Happen Here?
Is It Happening Here?
What Is the Danger that the Trump/Pence Government Poses?
April 27, 2017, United Methodist Church in the Village
Sponsored by RefuseFascism.org
Speakers:
George Prochnik, author, New Yorker contributor
Andy Zee, Refuse Fascism co-initiator, Revolution Books NYC spokesperson
Rita Dentino, Exec. Dir., Casa Freehold of National Day Laborers Organizing Network
Kierán Suckling, a founder and Executive Director of Center for Biological Diversity
Humanity faces an extreme emergency with Trump’s rise to power. This nationally live-streamed Teach-In aims to deeply explore, from different perspectives, the essential nature of the Trump/Pence Government, the relevance of the history of fascism, the threat it poses to humanity and the planet itself, and the dangers of normalization.
This event is being made into a quality video for distribution, donate and learn more atRefuseFascism.org
info@refusefascism.org / 917-407-1286 Twitter: @refusefascism / Facebook, Instagram: refusefascism
Media Sponsor: WBAI Radio, New York
People March in DC, Across the U.S. and Around the World to Demand Action on Climate Change
Updated April 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
(Photo: Twitter/@mmpadellan)
As climate change confronts humanity with the looming danger of global environmental catastrophe, more than 150,000 took part in the April 29 People’s Climate March in Washington, DC. And there were more than 300 “sister marches” across the U.S., from Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and other larger cities to smaller communities like Kalama, Washington, and Ft. Myers, Florida. People marched in different countries across the globe, from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Manila in the Philippines and many other countries. This was a week after the March for Science, when tens of thousands demonstrated in defense of science in DC, and hundreds of thousands in over 600 other locations throughout the U.S. and across the world.
On April 29, a broad range of people, of different ages and nationalities, marched in DC—from environmental activists to indigenous groups, unions, scientists, students, and many others. Actor/musician Eric Balfour tweeted: “RT if you are as proud as me of all the people standing up against #Trump and the #GOP. We won’t let them destroy our planet.” People carried all kinds of signs, often home-made—but among the most ubiquitous were “The oceans are rising and so are we!” and “There is no Planet B.”
The threat of climate change was already becoming increasingly clear before the Trump election. In its first 100 days in the White House, his regime has put the foot on the gas pedal, further accelerating the climate crisis. Just in the days before the march, Trump signed an order aiming to expand offshore oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, and the regime wiped almost all information about climate change from the Environmental Protection Agency website. The climate crisis is having devastating effects right now, especially in the poorest regions of the world—tens of millions driven from their homes because of extreme drought and other effects of climate change. Coral reefs and other ecosystems have already suffered enormous and even irreversible destruction. Even greater catastrophe, on a planetary level, is in store if the current trends continue. And the Trump/Pence regime is making its attacks on environmental protections and climate scientists one of the key ways they are asserting their power and rallying their fascist social base.
In the face of this, the resistance of the people is righteous and necessary. At the same time, the reality is that we are up against a fascist regime that is moving to consolidate its hold on power, not in a straight line but nevertheless very quickly and with reactionary determination. If they are allowed to consolidate power, it means unimaginable horrors for humanity and the planet we live on. That’s why the message brought to the climate march by people from Refuse Fascism is so crucial: NO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America! Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!
There is an urgent need for the struggle of the people as manifested in the People’s Climate March—and in the Women’s March, the protests against the Muslim ban and immigration raids, the March for Science and other actions—to continue... to spread, become more determined, and more sharply targeted at the Trump/Pence fascist regime.
The danger of global environmental disaster due to climate change has become clearer and clearer in recent years. Then came the Trump/Pence regime—and in their first 100 days, they’ve put this rush toward environmental catastrophe into overdrive.
Climate change is already having devastating impact on the natural world and people’s lives. Arctic ice and glaciers are melting at an accelerating pace, contributing to rising sea levels. Coral reefs—home to an incredible variety of sea life—are dying. Extreme weather—record-high temperatures, longer-lasting drought, more powerful storms—are forcing tens of millions out of their homes to become “climate refugees.”
There is overwhelming consensus among the world’s scientists, reached through decades of careful research, that climate change caused by human activity is real—and that increased levels in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) produced by the burning of fossil fuels is causing rising global temperatures, which in turn have all kinds of effects that threaten life on earth. An environmental emergency looms over humanity and the planet as a whole.
In this situation, a regime of climate change deniers and anti-science lunatics now heads up the world’s top economic and military power—with Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” at the lead.
A Refuse Fascism contingent of about 150 people joined several thousand demonstrators at the People’s Climate March in Wilmington (South Los Angeles, near Long Beach)—a mostly Latino community facing heavy pollution from the oil refineries. People in the march—retired people, environmentalists, people who were attending their first march ever, and people involved in local struggles around air and water quality—were outraged by the Trump/Pence regime's denial of climate change and disastrous environmental policies and searching for answers. We met students. There were 250 NO! signs in the march, calling for driving out the Trump/Pence regime. The Refuse Fascism contingent included 30 middle school students, part of a student environmental club that represents middle schools throughout LA County, as well as members of nurses unions and others. Their chants included “Danger, Danger, Fascists in the White House—It’s up to us to Drive Them Out!” and “There is no Planet B: Oust the Trump Regime!”
Seattle (Photo: Special to revcom.us)
Boulder, Colorado (Photo: Twitter/@EatTheCrust)
Washington, DC (Photo: Twitter/@djuancoleon)
Montpelier, Vermont (Photo: Twitter/@NFlourish)
Manila, Philippines (Photo: Twitter/@jennytuazn)
Geneva, Switzerland (Photo: Twitter/@as_trujillo)
Washington DC.
Kalama, Washington (Photo: Twitter/@NakMakFeegle)
People's Climate March, Washington DC, April 29. (Photo: Twitter/@SierraClub)
3,000 people from Austin and surrounding areas took part in the march in this city. Refuse Fascism Austin reported that many people approached their table to learn more, find out how to get involved, and voice their fears and concerns. Hundreds of marchers put on Refuse Fascism’s NO! stickers and dozens carried NO! signs.
Ft. Myers, Florida (Photo: Twitter/@2FLgals)
Rochester, NY (Photo: Allen Grieco)
Hundreds gathered near the entrance to the busy tourist district in Honolulu, Hawaii, for the march. Students from Pacific Island nations joined climate activists, many coming from faith communities, to demand action to save the planet. Speakers spoke to the urgency of protecting the planet from consumerism, corporate greed, and capitalism. The World Can't Wait-Hawai`i spokesperson challenged the crowd to join the larger struggle to drive out the Trump/Pence regime. A Hawaiian nationalist challenged the crowd to support justice for indigenous peoples. An 11-year-old said people are being forced to emigrate from his island nation of Tokelau due to the rising sea level. As protesters marched the length of the world-famous Waikiki beach, tourists clapped, photographed and cheered.
Points of Orientation on Berkeley and Ann Coulter:
The Issue Is NOT "Free Speech"—The Issue Is FASCISM
April 26, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On April 26, Ann Coulter announced the cancellation of the speech she was planning to make the next day in Berkeley at the University of California campus. The controversy over her speech has created all sorts of confusion, and these points of orientation remain valid. We will be covering this controversy as time goes on.
1) Ann Coulter is an outright fascist and advocate of horrific violence against oppressed people, as well as suppression of those she deems to be her opponents in the power structure. She has written 12 books, is constantly on major imperialist TV stations, and is an intellectual arm of the fascist regime in the White House. The poison she spews is not only profoundly not true, but is an extreme expression of the views that the fascist section of the ruling class which has taken power is trying to impose on all society. It is doing this by means of state power, through the use of the media it controls, and by unleashing and allowing its fascist mobs to terrorize oppressed people, through outright encouragement and tacit approval. Ann Coulter has had ample opportunity to spread her dangerous poison, while those who thoroughly oppose her are denied a platform.
2) Ann Coulter is in no way being suppressed by the government, so the entire issue of the First Amendment is a canard here—it has nothing to do with the question and is serving to confuse and disorient people. But Ann Coulter’s leader, Donald Trump, not only advocates the violent suppression of speech with which he disagrees, but has called for the imprisonment and denial of citizenship to those who burn the flag—a form of expression that the Supreme Court has ruled is indeed protected by the First Amendment. “First Amendment” and “free speech” have absolutely nothing to do with Coulter’s attempt to spew her poison and can in no way be made the terms of this battle.
3) Fascists have fixed their sights on Berkeley as a way to intimidate those who oppose Trump and make them bow down. They have unleashed forces who are obviously trained in violence and who intend to become the street militia of the regime if and as the regime encounters further demonstrations and other forms of resistance in the streets. The formation and forging of fascist fighting squads and their targeting of Berkeley is an extremely ominous development.
4) It is absolutely wrong for anyone claiming to recognize the threat posed by the Trump/Pence regime and the real damage that they are doing to equate organized violent fascist forces backed up by the regime in power and the state, and those who are determined to resist them. To be “even-handed” in this period is to profess one’s moral bankruptcy. We must not aid those in power by dividing the movement against Trump into “good protestors” and “bad protestors.”
5) There is a fascist regime in power which is moving quickly to radically remake this society on a fascist foundation: gutting the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, threatening nuclear war on the world, and demonizing and criminalizing whole peoples while changing the laws and norms in this country in a fascist direction. It can already be said that “First they came for the Muslims and immigrants...” Fascist leaders like Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, David Horowitz, etc. are giving a thin intellectual veneer to this fascist program. And we—in our millions—must stand up clearly and firmly and say NO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Live in a Fascist America.
It is imperative that all people who oppose the Trump/Pence fascist regime come out to demonstrate against Ann Coulter and the fascists who are backing her up. The lines must be drawn.What happens in Berkeley in these next few days matters.
Revcom.us received the following from the Revolution Club, Chicago
April 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Monday, May 1, 2017
Come to the protest for immigrant rights and march with the Revolution Club. Meet at 12 noon at Ashland and Washington, Union Park
Look for the REVCOM.US banners
The Revolution Club Says:
If you know how oppression feels: are you going to go along with targeting our immigrant brothers and sisters? Or are you going to join together with them to build a movement to tear this system down?
To Black people who say immigrants are taking away your opportunities to get ahead: Stop falling for that bullshit! This system has always gotten one people it oppresses to fight against other people it oppresses, while it sucks the blood of people all over the world.
Trump is rounding up immigrants, calling them dangerous criminals - ICE immigration police are raiding houses and workplaces and dragging people away in handcuffs, children are watching their parents snatched away. Even young children are being put in detention center prisons, sometimes in solitary confinement. People are being deported, sent to countries they risked everything to escape from, in some cases sent to certain death at the hands of gangs or government forces. Some people say, “Now they know how it feels to be Black.” Well if you know how this feels, why the fuck would you want anybody else to go through this? And if you know how this feels: are you going to go along with targeting these brothers and sisters? Or are you going to join together with them to build a movement to tear this system down?
We need a revolution. We need to overthrow this blood-sucking capitalist-imperialist system that forces people to come here and be subjected to all this in the first place. This country that ripped people from Africa, killing, enslaving, torturing, and raping them for hundreds of years to build up America’s wealth – is the same country that waged war on Mexico, stole half of its land, and now dominates Mexico’s farms, forcing peasants to work to produce food for the U.S., no longer able to grow food to feed their own families. It is the same country that is supplying the bombs raining down on Arab people in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East now facing mass starvation. And the same country that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Koreans in the 1950s and threatens war on North Korea today with the possibility of nuclear destruction of all humanity.
Humanity can get to a world without borders and nations, without one nation or one people oppressing another. The Revolution Club is getting organized for an actual revolution to bring that world into being, and we have the science, strategy and leadership in Bob Avakian to lead millions with a real chance to win. This revolution needs you. Get with Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolution. Join the Revolution Club. On May 1st march with the Revolution Club in the protest for immigrant rights.
Revcom.us received this from the Revolution Club, Chicago:
Revolution Summer! Chicago Fund
April 28, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
$20,000 is needed immediately to support the work being done in Chicago.
How do we get to our immediate $20,000 goal? A generous donor has pledged that when we get to $14,000 then they will get us to $15,000 AND when we get to $18,000 they will get us to $20,000! PLEASE DONATE GENEROUSLY.
Checks can be written to:
Revolution Summer Chicago Project
1555 N Western Ave, Suite 62
Chicago, IL 60622
Your donation is needed right now to support the work being done this summer in Chicago by the Chicago Revolution Club, out-of-town volunteers, and Carl Dix. The Club is taking out the leadership and the science people need to get free to the people who are currently shooting and murdering each other. The Club is on the front lines, fighting relentlessly to get the youth to stop the insanity and get into the revolution. This situation is more acute than ever as the Trump/Pence regime sets its fascist sights on Chicago.
Everyone with a heart agonizes over this situation. But here is a way for you to actually do something—make a donation that can actually make a difference—because this project is not about putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
$20,000 is needed immediately to support this project:
living costs for volunteers
costs of the organizing center on the South Side & opening one on the West Side
costs of materials, subsidizing books and t-shirts
legal costs for arrests that have already begun
Several times this amount will be needed over the next few months as this project expands.
WHAT WILL THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MEAN FOR BLACK PEOPLE?
The violent oppression of Black people has been deeply embedded in every aspect of this country for hundreds of years. Due to the workings of the system, now millions of Black people in the inner cities have become expendable in the eyes of this system. The political leadership of this system—Democrat and Republican—has responded with a sharp-edged program of repression. That program’s blade: vicious police brutality and mass incarceration and a legal system that lets killer cops off over and over.
Trump’s program for inner-city Chicago will take this to another level and serve as a model for his nationwide plan: The unleashing of police terror. Prisons and jails swollen with more Black and Latino youths. The gutting of public education, funneling youth into Christian fundamentalist schools that turn the lights out on critical thinking. The enlistment of some in enforcing submission to Trump's fascist America, maybe a place in the army or Border Patrol. The Trump/Pence plan is not to make America safe. Their aim is to extinguish the resistance of Black people against their oppression as a people once and for all. Chicago is ground zero. This cannot be allowed to go down.
THE REVOLUTION CLUB AND REVOLUTION SUMMER! IN CHICAGO
The Revolution Club lives by the six Points of Attention. It is where youth and others get organized to fight the power today to STOP the horrors of the system, and to transform the people, FOR REVOLUTION. The Revolution Club is where everyone can learn about Bob Avakian, the leadership, the strategy for making and winning a revolution. How to apply the science of communism to solve the challenges of emancipating all of humanity.
When 7 people were shot to death in 12 hours in South Shore, literally blocks from the Revolution Club organizing center, the Revolution Club was out there with Carl Dix’s statement “Get out of this insanity and get into the revolution.” They constantly struggle with the ideas that are pervasive, like, “this is a lost generation.” The Revolution Club replies, “To the youth who are caught up in the violence—you are NOT ‘too far gone,’ but you need to get into this revolution or you will be.”
As Trump threatens catastrophic war on North Korea, the Revolution Club fans out to the high schools with big military ROTC programs. They bring a challenge from Carl Dix to debate his position that oppressed people should not fight for their oppressors, but fight to overthrow this system instead. When a teenager was gang raped, the Revolution Club put up posters around her school and neighborhood with “Women are Not Bitches, Ho’s, Incubators, Punching Bags, Sex Objects, or Breeders! WOMEN ARE FULL HUMAN BEINGS.” The Revolution Club was there in the March for Science.
They are bold, they are challenging, and they are fighting for different morals and values all in the service of a revolution to emancipate not only Black people but all of humanity.
Artwork for printing this call
There are two sets of "spreads," with the two PDFs in each set meant to be printed back-to-back and folded.
For Commercial Printers: This set has the name "PRINTER" in the filename, and has .125 inch bleed on all 4 sides so that it prints to the edge of the paper. These are for a commercial printer.
For "At Home" Printing: This set is for home printers and is exactly 11in x 8.5in size. Depending on one's printer, you may or may not be able to print to the edge of the paper. It may shrink the page a little to fit inside the print area.
The Fascist Trump/Pence Regime's Vicious Persecution of Inauguration Day Protesters
May 1, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On January 20, thousands took to the streets in Washington, DC to protest the Trump inauguration. When some protesters clashed with police, more than 200 people were arrested, including legal observers and journalists. Initially most of those arrested were hit with one count of felony rioting, punishable for up to 10 years in prison. Now a grand jury, on April 28, has added new charges: inciting or urging to riot, conspiracy to riot, and counts of destruction of property.
The new indictment also charges three people not arrested on January 20. One of them, Dylan Petrohilos, a 28-year-old graphic designer who had his home raided by the police on April 3, was charged with rioting, conspiracy, and multiple counts of destruction of property.
Activists have called this outrageous persecution of protesters “the criminalization of dissent.”
A January 23 press release from the National Lawyers Guild said protesters were subjected to chemical weapons, including tear gas and pepper spray. It also described how police violated a law, which prohibits kettling [corralling] and mass arrests, and requires police to give dispersal warnings. The NLG said, “Police held arrestees at 12th and L St. NW for hours, denying basic needs such as treatment for injuries, water, and access to bathrooms. Police then pepper sprayed, tear gassed and subjected other protesters to concussion grenades without warning, including the elderly, people with disabilities, and children. Most were held overnight, and all were eventually charged with the felony of inciting a riot, despite a lack of individualized probable cause. In addition, phones and other belongings were confiscated by police as evidence....”
Samantha Miller, an organizer with the Disrupt J20 Collective, one of the groups that called for the protest, said, “These charges are absolutely horrifying. They are just trying to stop any resistance to the Trump administration. Many of these demonstrators were showing rage and fear of what’s coming. It’s going to take a lot more than asking nicely to create change and stop the threats from the Trump administration.” (Alternet, January 22, 2017)
The police and the government are not saying that most or even many of those arrested were directly engaged in property destruction or violence. They say the mass arrests were based on probable cause that each and every one of those arrested had “willfully incited or urged others to engage in the riot.” But according to the law, even in the case of an alleged riot, the police must have probable cause to arrest each and every individual.
At a pretrial hearing a U.S. attorney said each defendant would be shown individuated evidence of their participation in the riot and its incitement. But later, lawyers for those arrested were informed that this alleged evidence basically amounted to people being at the march and wearing black clothes. (Esquire, “How the Government is Turning Protesters into Felons,” April 12, 2017)
A press release from ResistThis (formerly DisruptJ20) described the April 3 raid on Dylan Petrohilos, one of those newly charged on April 27: “Washington DC metro police unjustly raided the home of a known prominent activist involved in the protests of the inauguration of Donald Trump ... police kicked in the door of the activist’s house, came in with their guns drawn, then ransacked the home, leaving items strewn about the floor. They confiscated thousands of dollars of electronic equipment, including computers, mobile phones, sound speakers, and a smart television. Inexplicably, the police also stole flags, banners, and even artwork...”
Such mass arrests are, of course, not new in America. For example, more than 700 Occupy protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in 2011. But for more than a decade now, mass arrests, let alone with felony charges, have been rare in DC. And the charge of felony riot is also somewhat rare, let alone being used against 200 people. Now the fascist Trump/Pence regime is sending out a clear message for how it is going to deal with dissent.
This is part of a fascist program that denies constitutional rights and unleashes the police and courts to criminalize dissent—that aims to demonize and severely repress any who defy its violent reinforcement of white supremacy, misogyny, and national chauvinism. As revcom.us has pointed out:
Fascism is the exercise of blatant dictatorship by the bourgeois (capitalist-imperialist) class, ruling through reliance on open terror and violence, trampling on what are supposed to be civil and legal rights, wielding the power of the state, and mobilizing organized groups of fanatical thugs, to commit atrocities against masses of people, particularly groups of people identified as “enemies,” “undesirables,” or “dangers to society.”
This IS what the Trump/Pence regime is hammering into place. This IS a fascist regime that must be driven out!
On the 25th Anniversary of the Los Angeles Rebellion:
Carl Dix is a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party and a follower of and advocate for Bob Avakian, his leadership and his visionary new synthesis of communism. He is a courageous freedom fighter from the1960s who went on to become a revolutionary fighter and a communist. Dix spent two years in military prison for refusing to fight in the unjust Vietnam War. He emerged unrepentant and went on to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, dedicating his life to the emancipation of all humanity. Carl is a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism. He co-founded, with Cornel West, the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), and initiated Rise Up October that brought thousands into the streets in New York City in 2015 demanding a stop to police terror. More recently, Carl was dragged out of the Senate hearing on Jeff Sessions' nomination to be U.S. Attorney General, chanting “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA.”
It Is Right, and Necessary, To Rebel & To Go from Rebellion to Revolution!
by Carl Dix
Twenty-five years ago, Los Angeles exploded in rebellion after a jury exonerated the Los Angeles cops who were caught on video viciously beating Rodney King. This verdict was the system saying that it didn’t matter even though the world had watched their pigs brutalizing a Black man on TV. They let these pigs walk anyway. And that Black people deserved nothing and would get nothing but a pig’s boot on their necks, a prison cell to be caged in, or an early grave to be thrown into.
But the masses of people in LA said Hell, No, not this time. Black people rose in rebellion, and people of all nationalities joined in. As Bob Avakian (BA) said right after the rebellion, “This rebellion was the most beautiful, the most heroic, and the most powerful action by the masses of people in the U.S. for years and years. It sent shockwaves throughout the U.S. and around the world, striking fear and panic into the oppressors and causing the hearts of oppressed people everywhere to beat faster with joy and hope.”
The U.S. rulers were puffed up off of having rained death and destruction on Iraq in their 1991 war against that country, feeling that they had delivered a message to the world that they were the top dog and couldn’t be challenged. But the LA Rebellion showed the world there were people on the bottom of this society who were in no mood to join the celebration of U.S. world domination. By rising up in rebellion, the masses in LA declared to the world that they refused to accept the brutality and indignity this system enforced on them. And people in cities across the U.S. heard this call and took to the streets in solidarity—rebellions erupted in cities like Las Vegas, Oakland, and Seattle, and there were protests against police brutality in many other cities.
In the midst of rising up in outrage against the outrageous verdict in the Rodney King case, Black youth forged a truce that ended decades of fighting and killing among the street gangs of LA. On the first night of the rebellion, graffiti went up on the walls that said: “Bloods, Crips and Mexicans together tonight.” During and after the rebellion there were many scenes of members of rival gang members, people who had been sworn enemies, hanging out together and embracing each other.
Yes, this is a film, but that is not its essence. This is a daring, substantive, scientific summoning to revolution. 6+ hours that can change how you see the world and what you do with the rest of your life. Is this hype? No. —From one of the filmmakers
The system had enforced conditions in the inner cities that left these youth facing futures of no hope. It had flooded their neighborhoods with drugs and unleashed its pigs to bust them under the War on Drugs, which was really a war on the people. These young people were left with no way to have meaning in their lives except to form street gangs whose codes of revenge had them fighting and killing other oppressed youth who were just like them.
As BA says in BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, forging this truce was hard. The youth had to reach over years of killings, and the calls for revenge these killings generated, to embrace each other. And they had to try very hard to maintain the truce in the face of attacks by the pigs who would attack them when they gathered to hold picnics to celebrate the truce.
The youth worked heroically to keep the truce in effect, but ultimately they didn’t succeed. On top of the attacks by the system, they were confronted with the reality that this capitalist-imperialist system has no future for millions of youth penned up in the ghettos and barrios across the U.S.
On this 25th anniversary, we should remember the heroic efforts of the youth of LA, and we need to learn three lessons: 1) that people rising in rebellion against injustice was, and is, righteous, necessary, and beautiful. This makes it possible for oppressed people to raise their heads, to begin to see further than the grind of their day-to-day existence and to begin to get organized for revolution, while also opening up space to transform the thinking of all society; 2) that breaking the youth out of the street life and overcoming all the divisions among the masses, not just for a brief period of time after which they slide back into it, can only be done as part of building a movement FOR revolution. This is more urgent than ever, and it’s something our Party has set itself to right now, especially in Chicago in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to send in the feds to “fix” the violence here; and 3) that we need more than just rebellions—we need a revolution, and to make that revolution, people have to be struggled with to transform themselves as they are mobilized to join the struggle to fight the powers. And that there is leadership for this revolution in BA, a leader who has developed the strategy to make such a revolution and brought forward a vision of the world that revolution could bring into being. The most pressing thing facing this new generation of youth caught up in the gang scene, and their revolutionary vanguard, is to actually get them OUT of that, and get into the revolution.
In memory of Ajith Surendra Valentine Rupasinghe (Comrade Surendra)
Born 14 February 1943, died 3 April 2017
May 1, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
27 April 2017. A World to Win News Service. It is with great sadness that A World to Win News Service learned of the recent death of Ajith Rupasinghe, generally known as comrade Surendra, a revolutionary communist leader from Sri Lanka.
Comrade Surendra was living in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s when he first became a revolutionary, originally introduced to communism by his older brother Kumar who travelled to the U.S. from Sri Lanka to share his discoveries with Surendra.
Like many others, comrade Surendra came forward politically during the exuberant years of the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and early ’70s and the great social transformations being made through the Cultural Revolution in China led by Mao Tsetung. Surendra also went through the bitter experience of seeing Mao’s socialist China transformed into a capitalist monstrosity. Surendra worked with the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA in the second half of the 1970s and notably attended Bob Avakian’s 1978 speech denouncing and exposing the counter-revolutionary coup in China following Mao’s death.
Surendra had been pursuing doctoral studies in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where he had also been propagating revolutionary politics. In the final stages of his PhD work, a faculty committee demanded that he water down his work—as he described it, “they demanded I get on my knees”—and change what he was saying because of the way it exposed this system of global capitalism-imperialism. He refused.
Comrade Surendra returned to Sri Lanka. As a well-educated young man, Surendra could have chosen many paths for his life, yet he chose unswerving dedication to the cause of emancipation. He joined what was then known as the Ceylon Communist Party (CCP) led by comrade N. Sanmugathasan, a long-time communist leader who had played an early and outstanding role in denouncing the counter-revolutionary coup in China and who was part of the early efforts to regroup Maoist forces that resulted in the founding the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) in 1984.
Surendra became a key CCP activist and took part in numerous struggles the party led among the masses in Sri Lanka, for example in the Hatton area, among the tea workers who toiled in conditions of near slavery on the country’s tea plantations established under British colonial rule. Even today many recall Surendra’s role in these activities. For a number of years in the early 1980s, Surendra lived in a fishing village in the Ratmalana district.
Following the death of comrade Sanmugathasan in 1993, comrade Surendra became the leader of the Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist), the name the party adopted in 1991.
Surendra was one of far too few people in the world who fought to uphold what Mao had brought forth. He also fought to help regroup communists in the world around Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Comrade Surendra was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and actively took part in the activities and campaigns of RIM. He was particularly known for his firm support for the People’s War in Nepal from the very beginning until the Nepalese party leadership abandoned the revolutionary path in favour of participation in a “restructured” reactionary state. A betrayal that Surendra justly and forcefully condemned.
During this whole period, Surendra fought to organize people in Sri Lanka for revolution under very difficult conditions, and tried repeatedly to re-establish a communist vanguard. He was a tireless editorialist, writing many thought-provoking articles on different aspects of communist theory, practical revolutionary activity and philosophy. He was a determined opponent of the Sri Lankan ruling class and distinguished himself by being one of very few voices from the Sinhalese community that consistently supported the rights of the Tamil people and exposed the vicious repression and genocide of the Sri Lankan state aimed at the Tamil political organizations and population.
What distinguished Surendra from some others who had also tried to carry forward the revolutionary communist banner after the death of Mao was his enthusiastic, passionate welcome to the emergence of the new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian. In the last decade of his life in particular, Comrade Surendra carried out serious study of Avakian’s works and defended the new synthesis both in Sri Lanka and internationally through his writings on the Internet. As the former Maoist movement “divided into two”, Surendra took a clear position in favour of the future, the new synthesis of communism.
Comrade Surendra’s defence of the new synthesis was in no way an empty declaration of allegiance. His many writings sought to critically examine different aspects of the new synthesis and explore their implications. Selections from his writings need to be popularized in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
Comrade Surendra courageously battled on to the very end of his life in the face of a very difficult situation in Sri Lanka and internationally. Despite increasingly serious health conditions and vicious attacks on his personal milieu by powerful reactionary forces, he remained unflinching in his devotion to the cause of humanity. He did not live to see the fruits of his energies, but we are quite confident that many of the seeds he planted will sprout.
Comrade Surendra’s contributions to revolutionary communism, in Sri Lanka and in the world, will live on as women and men come forward to battle imperialism and reaction and come not only to be inspired by the revolutionary determination of leaders who went before them but also look to the scientific understanding that directed and energized comrade Surendra and which he contributed to popularising.
As Surendra himself put it in the months before his death, “All genuine communist revolutionaries around the world must rise up to expose, critique, and overthrow this accumulated pile of rotting revisionist garbage and undertake the task of defending, applying, and advancing the new synthesis, as the basis for reconstituting the international communist movement and preparing our ranks, the advanced forces and basic masses for an unprecedented great leap forward towards achieving the new world rising on the horizon, as a matter of life and death for the future of communism.”
Surendra will be missed and we must help people carry on his work.
―The editors, A World to Win News Service
On March 17, 2017, A World to Win News Service (AWTWNS) announced its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism. Read its “Editorial: Introducing a transformed AWTWNS” here.
Taking Science and Revolution and The New Communism to the March for Science
From a reader:
April 28, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Two volunteers with The Bob Avakian Institute, which is dedicated to making the work of Bob Avakian known throughout society, took the books 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 and Bob Avakian’s THE NEW COMMUNISM to the March for Science on April 22. We set up a table with banners with big images of the book covers and the words SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION. Throughout the day, there was a steady stream of people stopping to check this out and many who were changed by what they found.
People at the march had a deep appreciation for the scientific method and a sense of what it would mean if people were denied this crucial tool. Many were outraged by the worldview of “alternative truths” and “might makes right” that is being promoted and enforced by the Trump/Pence regime, that this regime is denying scientific evidence about things that clearly affect the very future of humanity and all life on this planet. But most had not thought about the importance of applying science to understand and to change society.
People we spoke with found it challenging and exciting to learn about Bob Avakian. who has dedicated his life’s work to doing just that, and through this has provided answers to the most important question of human emancipation. The fact that science itself has developed and that Avakian has both rescued and qualitatively developed the science of communism, placing it on a thoroughly scientific foundation, was very attractive and was at the heart of the many rich discussions that followed.
And there were so many rich discussions, mainly focused on questions people raised about “why communism.” “Wasn’t that proven to be inherently flawed? Weren’t scientists suppressed in communist societies? What is this new synthesis and how is it different? How does this enable people to change the world? What does this provide for solving what appear to be intractable and horrifying conditions all over the world? Who is Bob Avakian? What is his background and history?”
A couple of university students literally asked all of these questions in rapid fire. They are freshman science students and are forming a kind of in-your-face gay organization that speaks to both the attacks on homosexuality and Islamaphobia. They had adopted the framework of post-modernism because of how they were understanding issues of identity and because that is what is being taught at their university. But at the same time, one of them was straining up against the assertion that truth does not exist except as the “narratives of individuals.” They could see how this relativism stood in opposition to really understanding the world. They were excited about bringing the work of BA to their just-forming organization—and hoped that someone from The BA Institute would meet with them.
A science teacher at a progressive private school talked about growing up with religion. He is Black and said he felt that religion was problematic, holding back the process of really understanding reality. He said his students are incredibly curious and looking for real answers now, and that perhaps his school could purchase the Interview with Ardea Skybreak and he could incorporate it into the classes he teaches. He said to send him the ways that he could order the book, that there was a budget for this, and to email him a manuscript as well.
A youth in his early teens from the neighborhoods where “HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution,” by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, had been posted everywhere, said he had read it a number of times and went to revcom.us and read the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America and had watched part of a video of Bob Avakian speaking. He also loves science and had volunteered to help with the march and was excited to meet up with us in this context. His father told him that BA was too extreme, but he said he is finding that, while it is extreme, it is making so much sense. He gave us a way to reach him and said he would check his messages every day and would like to come to a meeting of the Revolution Club.
A physics Ph.D. student agreed that capitalism itself is causing so much human suffering and that it is inherent in the system, but wanted to know “why communism?” He was appreciative when we critiqued the method he used to arrive at the conclusion that communism was no better, in opposition to how BA has gone at this: delving deeply into the original theory as developed by Marx who, like Darwin, made huge breakthroughs in human understanding applying the scientific method to their respective fields. And how BA then has applied this method to learn from the rich history of two massive experiments—in the Soviet Union and China—and also from developments in other spheres of human knowledge, and talked about how Skybreak describes this process, making analogies to any good scientific investigation. He bought the Skybreak Interview and said he would get back to us, that he felt he needed to read her arguments and would do so soon.
There were many similar conversations throughout the day.
We learned a lot that day and this made us want to dig even more deeply into BA’s work and the Skybreak Interview.
Even as we’re up against so many serious attacks and dangers, this was truly a rich and exciting day for science and for the future of humanity.
Trump/Pence Super-Predators Speed Up Danger of Climate Change
We Need to Drive Out the Fascist Regime... AND We Need a Whole Different World
April 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The danger of global environmental disaster due to climate change has become clearer and clearer in recent years. Then came the Trump/Pence regime—and in their first 100 days, they’ve put this rush toward environmental catastrophe into overdrive.
Climate change is already having devastating impact on the natural world and people’s lives. Arctic ice and glaciers are melting at an accelerating pace, contributing to rising sea levels. Coral reefs—home to an incredible variety of sea life—are dying. Extreme weather—record-high temperatures, longer-lasting drought, more powerful storms—is forcing tens of millions out of their homes to become “climate refugees.”
There is overwhelming consensus among the world’s scientists, reached through decades of careful research, that climate change caused by human activity is real—and that increased levels in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) produced by the burning of fossil fuels are causing rising global temperatures, which in turn have all kinds of effects that threaten life on earth. An environmental emergency looms over humanity and the planet as a whole.
In this situation, a regime of climate change deniers and anti-science lunatics now heads up the world’s top economic and military power—with Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” at the lead. While they may uphold science and technology that serve their “America First” agenda, they are undermining science in critical areas like public health and climate change through huge funding cuts and witch hunts against scientists. Scientists and others are frantically trying to preserve scientific data, because of fears that it could be lost to the storehouse of human knowledge through the actions of Trump/Pence.
The executive order signed by Trump on March 28 moves toward eliminating what small measures the U.S. has had in place to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. His order directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to essentially gut Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by modest amounts. The order also calls for opening up public lands for leasing to coal mining, eliminating regulations that limit emissions from coal-fired power plants, doing away with standards that limit emissions of methane (another key greenhouse gas), and getting rid of other environmental protections.
If the Trump/Pence fascists are able to consolidate their hold on power, it will be a nightmare for humanity. They must not be given the opportunity to wreak years more of irreversible harm on the planet and life on it. This regime of super-predators must be stopped and driven from power, as soon as possible.
Trump has not yet officially pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. But Trump’s initial actions on the environment have already made clear that his regime has no intention of meeting the U.S. goals for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris accords, as inadequate as those goals were. This could cause other countries, fearful that the U.S. capitalists could gain a competitive advantage, to also abandon the Paris treaty—leading to even more greenhouse gases pouring into the earth’s atmosphere.
Excerpt from the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America on the environment:
Authored by Bob Avakian, and adopted by the Central Committee of the RCP
In the context of a society aiming for and moving toward communism, a world without any relations of exploitation and oppression, the New Socialist Republic in North America will have a radically different approach to the environment.
Article 1, Section 2B.
The establishment of the New Socialist Republic in North America, through the defeat of the imperialist state of the USA, while it could not have occurred without the unleashing of further violent and destructive acts on the part of that outmoded imperialist state, nevertheless represents a truly gigantic stride toward the emancipation of humanity and with regard to the ability to more frontally and comprehensively confront and address the critical environmental emergency threatening humanity and the other species and ecosystems (the complex webs of interacting and interrelating life) on this earth. In full recognition of this, the New Socialist Republic in North America, in its development of a socialist economy, in all spheres of government and social activity, and in its international relations, will apply itself—and the initiative, knowledge, energy and creativity of the masses of people who make up and are the backbone of this Republic—to addressing this environmental emergency, in its various dimensions, and will seek out the ways to do so through increasing cooperation and common endeavor with scientists, and people from all walks of life, in every part of the world, struggling and joining with others in struggle to overcome barriers that are placed in the way of such efforts by the operation of the capitalist-imperialist system and the functioning of imperialist and other reactionary states.
Check out the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) and order it online.
Let’s look at the Paris agreement, supposedly the crowning achievement of the U.S. and other powers “leading” the fight against climate change. The dominant forces behind that treaty openly said that they were not even aiming for measures that would keep the global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—which is what climate scientists say is needed to keep the global environment from plunging into disaster. Even if all the countries were to meet the voluntary goals for cuts in greenhouse gases—which is highly unlikely—that would still lead to unacceptable global temperature rises. The agreement does not even mention the U.S. military, the largest single institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
This just scratches the surface of why the Paris accords—even if put fully into practice—can only somewhat slow down the approach of environmental catastrophe, at best. It does not do what is urgently needed to deal with the threat of climate change in a real way.
The Trump/Pence regime must be driven out before they can do even greater harm. The reality is that Trump is an extreme concentration of a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—that had already been pushing the world toward environmental disaster before Trump. The answer is not to go “back” to the Paris agreement and supposedly more “sensible” and “saner” capitalism-imperialism. Under this system, nothing can be done unless, ultimately, there is profit. It’s a system where different capitalists and blocs of capitalists compete against each other under the ruthless commandment of “expand or die”—compelling them to rapaciously exploit the environment without regard for consequences for humanity and ecosystems, the complex web of life on the planet.
What is needed is an actual revolution that uproots and sweeps away this system. A revolution that brings into being a whole new economic and political system—with a state that has a completely different orientation and ethos than what exists under the current system, including in relation to the environment. There is, in fact, a blueprint for such a society: the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. We invite all who are agonizing over the state of the world and seeking real solutions to the horrors and dangers facing humanity to get into this inspiring—and viable—vision of a whole different world that is possible.
Carl Dix is a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party and a follower of and advocate for Bob Avakian, his leadership and his visionary new synthesis of communism. He is a courageous freedom fighter from the1960s who went on to become a revolutionary fighter and a communist. Dix spent two years in military prison for refusing to fight in the unjust Vietnam War. He emerged unrepentant and went on to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, dedicating his life to the emancipation of all humanity. Carl is a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism. He co-founded, with Cornel West, the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), and initiated Rise Up October that brought thousands into the streets in New York City in 2015 demanding a stop to police terror. More recently, Carl was dragged out of the Senate hearing on Jeff Sessions' nomination to be U.S. Attorney General, chanting “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA.”
As The Trump/Pence Regime Threatens War With North Korea—
Should Oppressed People Fight for the System That Holds Them Down—Or Should We Fight to Overthrow That System?
CARL DIX CHALLENGES ANYONE TO A DEBATE OVER THE US THREATS OF WAR AGAINST NORTH KOREA!
April 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
I was drafted into the U.S. army in the 1960s and given orders to go to Vietnam. I refused to go fight in Vietnam and served two years in prison because of that. I wasn’t going to go thousands of miles to be part of a war against people fighting to free their country while Black people were catching hell in this country.
That same question is up today. The US has ships armed with nuclear weapons and tens of thousands of troops around the borders of North Korea. A US war with that small country would be an unjust, imperialist war. If nuclear weapons are used, millions of people would die, millions more would suffer starvation and the climate of the whole planet would be devastated.
It is not in the interests of humanity to fight in or to support this system’s wars. Instead of fighting for this system, oppressed people need to get with the revolution to overthrow the system that threatens the world with nuclear war! And they need to get with the leadership we have for this revolution in Bob Avakian, a leader who has figured out how we could succeed in getting rid of this system thru revolution and developed a vision of the kind of world that this revolution could bring into being. You can find out about this leader and this revolution at Revcom.us.
And to the youth: Don’t go running to join their capitalist-imperialist army. It’s their army, not ours. And this isn’t our country either. The only time they tell us it’s our country is when they want us to fight, kill people and maybe die for them. Otherwise, they have their pigs beating us down, locking us up and even killing us off. Oppressed people have no business fighting in this system’s wars. And we shouldn’t ever get sucked into rooting for our oppressors to ever win a war. A system that has put a lunatic like Trump in the White House and a Christian fascist like Pence right beside him, and is threatening the world with nuclear war is no damned good. It needs to be gotten rid of thru revolution. We shouldn’t be fighting for them, and we shouldn’t be fighting each other either. We need to be seizing on their troubles to get busy preparing to do away with their system by making revolution at the soonest possible time.
So I will debate anyone who wants to tell the youth to join that imperialist army around this question:
Resolved: Oppressed people should not support the war moves of their oppressors or fight in their wars—We should fight to overthrow that system!
Contact the Revolution Club in Chicago
Phone: 312-804-9121, email: revclub.chi@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/revclubchi.
1857 E. 71st St., Hours 3-7 pm every day but Monday
Top Six Reasons Fascist Pig Ann Coulter Has Said Too Much Already and Should Shut the Fuck Up
April 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
One: She is a shameless racist who celebrates America’s roots in slavery and mass murder, and its current reality as a white supremacist country, and purveys the ludicrous myth that white people are victims of genocide.
» “This is a country created by white people ... I am a native because I am a descendant from settlers.” (Cited by International Business Times, April 26, 2017)
» Claiming that the U.S. immigration system deliberately aims to reduce the percentage of whites in the population, Coulter said: “In 1960 whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050 ... One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. ... If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any other group than white Americans, it would be called genocide.” (“Bush’s America: Roach Motel,” Ann Coulter column, January 2, 2010)
Two: She advocates for barbaric fascist repression of Black and Latino youth.
» “I have to say I’m all for public flogging. One type of criminal that a public humiliation might work particularly well with are the juvenile delinquents, a lot of whom consider it a badge of honor to be sent to juvenile detention. And it might not be such a cool thing in the ‘hood’ to be flogged publicly.” (“The Wisdom of Ann Coulter” in The Washington Monthly, October 2001)
Three: She hates Muslims and is whipping up a pogromist mentality against them.
» “I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’” (Speech to the CPAC conference, as reported by Michelle Malkin, cited in Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz. Other witnesses concur.)
Four: She creates public opinion for mass murder of civilians in present and future U.S. wars.
» “I’m getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties. I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning.” (Interview with George Gurley, The New York Observer, January 10, 2005)
» “Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age.” (Coulter column: “Muslim Bites Dog,” February 15, 2006)
Five: She promotes virulent contempt for and hatred of women.
» “It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact.” (2003 interview cited in Cornell University Chronicle Online, April 17, 2006)
Six: She directs heavy fire at bourgeois liberals who still uphold aspects of democracy, and bourgeois institutions, in order to clear a path for a full fascist crackdown on society.
» “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh [right-wing terrorist who bombed the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 167 people] is he did not go to the New York Times building.” (Quoted in “Coultergeist” by George Gurley at The Observer, August 25, 2002)
» “Most public schools are, at best, nothing but expensive babysitting arrangements, helpfully keeping hoodlums off the street during daylight hours. At worst, they are criminal training labs, where teachers sexually abuse the children between drinking binges and acts of grand larceny.” (Guest on Hannity & Colmes, June 29, 2006)
This is really only a small sampling of the poison that Coulter “brings to the conversation.” In reality, inviting her to a campus—or anywhere—makes as much sense as flooding a schoolyard with raw sewage so that the students can then have a reasonable discussion about what shit smells like.
Chicago. Credit: Ted Sirota/Degenerate Artists Against Fascism
Los Angeles. Credit:@RefuseFascismLA
Los Angeles. Credit:@RefuseFascismLA
At a time when the Trump/Pence regime is vilifying and targeting Muslims, refugees, and Latino and other immigrants, protests on April 24 Holocaust Remembrance Day in a number of U.S. cities drew the links between the enormous crimes against humanity committed by Hitler and the Nazis and what is happening in this country today. These actions sounded an urgent alarm about the dangerous course of the Trump/Pence regime and sent out the message: never again must we allow another Holocaust to happen to any group of people.
As part of the protests on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, the “Adolf Eichmann award”—“for leadership in the field of detention and deportation of ‘undesirables’”—was given to John Kelly, the U.S. general now heading the Department of Homeland Security. Eichmann was in charge of deporting Jews to the Nazi concentration camps. And the “Joseph Goebbels award”—“for demonizing and persecuting ‘undersirables’”—went to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general. Goebbels was minister of propaganda for Hitler. In the days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, Sessions and Kelly went to the U.S.-Mexico border and issued rabid threats against undocumented immigrants. They, and the regime as a whole, are ratcheting up fascist measures and a climate of demonization and marginalization of immigrants that echo how the Nazis targeted Jews as “subhuman,” “undesirables,” and “enemies,” setting the stage for the Holocaust.
The following is based on reports we received on the Holocaust Remembrance Day actions in several cities.
~~~~~~~~~
New York City
About 25 people gathered in front of the Jewish Heritage Museum in Manhattan. Travis Morales opened by speaking directly to the connection between the escalating attacks on immigrants and Muslims by the Trump Regime and the demonization and targeting of the Jewish people by the Nazis. He said this has a logic and momentum that can lead to real horrors. Scott Gilbert, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, and whose mother was a childhood friend of Anne Frank, spoke about the parallels between Germany in the 1930s and Trump’s America. Citing Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller, who declared that the president’s authority “will not be questioned,” Gilbert compared it to a similar quote from Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He said that if “Never Again” is going to mean anything, it has to mean something now—when immigrants, Muslims, and people all over the world are being threatened by the Trump/Pence fascist regime in the most powerfully militarized country on earth.
Statements in support of this action were sent to Refuse Fascism from David Meyerhof, grandson of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof; Creighton University professor Fidel Acosta-Fajardo, who is one of the professors on the right-wing “Professors Watchlist”; Donald W. Shriver, President Emeritus of the Union Theological Seminary; and others.
From the Jewish Heritage Museum, the group, led by people in orange jumpsuits stamped with the words “ICE DETAINEE,” headed to the Federal Building, where the Eichmann and Goebbels “awards” were presented to Kelly and Sessions. As the procession marched for a mile through downtown Manhattan, people’s heads turned and many reached out for Refuse Fascism flyers. One woman said, “I can really see how this could be like another Holocaust, the way they are targeting whole groups of people like that. This is how it starts.”
Chicago
A determined and diverse group gathered in the downtown Loop to loudly and colorfully declare “Never again will we allow another Holocaust to happen to any people!” Carrying signs from Refuse Fascism saying “NO!” in many languages and a banner declaring “From 1933 to 2017, Never Again! Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!” they lined up in front of the Loop Synagogue, which was the target of a fascist attack in February when the building was defaced with swastikas and windows broken.
After an MC from Refuse Fascism made some introductory comments, she introduced a series of powerful speakers. First up to the mic was a soft-spoken representative of the American Muslim Task Force who read a statement from Salman Aftab. The message itself was loud and clear: “If you allow Muslims or immigrants to be demonized, to be called terrorists and rapists by the President of the USA, we have seen where this racism and scapegoating can lead. This can be a first step to a new Holocaust. We have to resist now!”
The MC read a statement from Father Bob Bossie, SCJ, recalling his visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp: “As I wandered through this place of horror, I realized that the persons who did this were not devils but were like me, ordinary persons who had slowly capitulated to the customs of the day in order to avoid ridicule, keep a job, go along to get along, avoid persecution, keep going to the better school, or who simply thought it wouldn't, couldn't and didn't happen here.”
Ted Sirota, founder of Degenerate Artists Against Fascism, told the story of his great grandfather who was shot and killed by the Nazis in Poland, along with many others of his extended family, even before the concentration camps were in full operation. He said, “And now along with synagogues, Black churches in the South and mosques are under attack—all people of conscience must say NO!”
Bob Avakian, "Why do people come here from all over the world?" A clip from Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian given in 2003 in the United States.
Brother Michael C. Oboza, speaking as a member of the LGBTQ/Bi community, shared that he had been a Catholic who didn't believe that the Holocaust really happened, but then learned that 15,000 gays and suspected gays were among those killed in the Holocaust, and many more forced to wear the pink triangle.
The Rev. Taigen Dan Leighton, a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, also sent a statement, saying, “All of us who represent true spiritual and ethical values, and the values our country claims to be founded on, must now speak out.”
The MC reminded those gathered and the press that the U.S. has already registered and rounded up a whole group of people and sent them to concentration camps—people of Japanese descent during WWII.
From there, the group marched boldly down a major street several blocks to the ICE Chicago headquarters in Chicago. Chants rang out: “1933 to 2017, Never Again! Drive Out the Trump Regime!” “In the Name of Humanity, Stop the Insanity, No Ban-No Wall, No Fascist USA!” “Dump Trump. Dump Pence, The World Can't Wait, Drive out the Fascism Regime before it's too late!”
The day before this action, two Refuse Fascism people went out to the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, outside of Chicago, to attend their Holocaust Day program. The moving program was led by Holocaust survivors who lit candles for the Jews the Nazis killed. The MC, a Holocaust survivor, said the Holocaust Day honors the date for the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which he called "the most significant armed resistance to the Nazis."
American Lives
Are Not More
Important Than
Other People's Lives.
Bob Avakian,
BAsics 5:7
Los Angeles
There was a procession through the downtown streets of people in prison uniforms, representing the victims of the Holocaust. The procession included Jewish activists, members of the Refuse Fascism Los Angeles chapter, and people who had come from a march of 2,000 people earlier in the day marking the genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman (Turkish) empire in the early 1900s.
People lined up outside of the LAPD headquarters dressed in prison uniforms representing victims of the Holocaust. They attempted to deliver a hand-written “award” to the head of the L.A. County Sheriffs Department, stating, "You, Sheriff Jim McDonnell, head sheriff of LA County are being presented with the Adolf ICEman Award for collaborating with the Fascist Trump/Pence regime and for your collaboration with ICE in carrying out deportation." The procession then took off. In a single line, the procession, trailed by supporters chanting "Never again to any people," walked through downtown city streets filled with heavy afternoon traffic. They walked through a section of Little Tokyo and stopped in front of the Japanese-American Museum. Connections were made between the horrors of the Holocaust, the concentration camps for people of Japanese descent in the U.S., and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The procession then went to the MDC (Metropolitan Detention Center).
The Holocaust Remembrance Day was also marked by a group of people on the University of California Los Angeles campus.
San Francisco
Several dozen people gathered at the S.F. headquarters of ICE for the Bay Area region. Three members of Holocaust survivor families spoke.
The first to speak was Steve Rapport, a member of Indivisible, who told the gripping story of his mother’s survival from a German death camp and the brutal murder of his grandfather by Nazi SS thugs. The previous week Rapport had galvanized people at a Senator Dianne Feinstein town hall when, after telling his story there, he demanded to know from Feinstein why the Democrats “haven’t drawn a red line around the fascist White House.”
Roman Rimer, a member of Refuse Fascism, and the Bay Area Queer Anti-Fascist Network, told of growing up with the stories of his grandfather’s family members who were killed in the Holocaust in Poland. He then turned toward the ICE building and denounced the enforcers in that building for their actions that are tearing families apart and creating great pain and sorrow.
Bruce Neuburger told of how his father only left Germany in 1938 because he, like many other Germans, didn’t believe until it was almost too late, that the Nazis would take things to such murderous extremes. He said, “People failed to act decisively when they still could. Then the Aryan supremacists, the core of the Nazi social base, got the upper hand. Those who opposed Hitler, who had the potential to stop the march to full out fascism, failed to realize the extent of the danger.”
A statement was read from a daughter of Guatemalan refugees, who is now an immigrant rights activist. Her statement said in part, “The fear that has been instilled in families without documentation by ICE is unjust and immoral.”
Following the rally a delegation from the protest attempted to “deliver” to ICE authorities in the building the Joseph Goebbels award to Sessions and the Adolf Eichmann award to Kelley in recognition of their persecution of immigrants, in loyal service to the fascist Trump/Pence regime.
In my outrage since the election, I have been including people at my workplace when I distribute leaflets, etc., especally from Refuse Fascism. And a few of us took a lunch hour not long ago to watch and talk about the video of Bob Avakian from revcom.us, “BA Through the Years.” There was a definite recognition when BA talked about the prisoners in the Corcoran SHU being played, and I could tell some felt challenged by BA saying that the point is to get together and change all this, with revolution. Among the bigger mix of people there (white, Black, Latin American), there is definite upset about this regime, even while most still don’t see this fascism as the emergency that I do.
This past Monday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I brought stickers with “NO!” and “Never Again Means Never Again! Drive Out the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime!” and invited people to join others everywhere and wear it for the day. 20 people (most of us) put it on, wearing it til the end of the day (I don’t know what they all did after work). Even people who have felt I’m “over the top” wore the sticker this day. We looked great!
Now I’m going to spread around the revcom.us article about all that happened that day so everyone can see what they were part of.
In our efforts to reach and move millions to act in this urgent moment, here was a form for people to act together and start to see a larger movement they are part of, and that could help them now take it further.
As Trump Regime Ratchets Up Attacks on Immigrants...
Homeland Security Head Channels Nazi Predecessors
April 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A Nazi atmosphere and repression against undocumented immigrants is being implemented right now. This was laid out in a stark and ominous way in Homeland Security head John Kelly’s April 18 speech at George Washington University. It was a speech that denied, distorted, and justified what is a rapidly escalating reign of terror against immigrants, and which declared this is necessary to provide a “peaceful life [!] in a free [!] country.”
To which anybody with a half a brain or heart must respond: Peaceful!? Free!? For whom!?...
The Trump/Pence regime is ratcheting up terror, detention, and deportation directed at 11 million people within the borders of the U.S., and is creating a climate of demonization and marginalization for all immigrants, and for Muslims in general. And, for that matter, how “peaceful” and “free” is this society for poor Black and Latino people in the inner cities, subjected to crushing poverty and police murder and terror?
Channeling the Nazis Heading into Holocaust Remembrance Day
In his speech, Kelly lashed out at anyone who, because of what he called “some alleged event at an airport, in a courthouse, or at a border crossing ... assume[s] the men and women or DHS [Department of Homeland Security] are intentionally abusing innocent individuals while breaking or ignoring U.S. law or court orders.”
Alleged events?!
The Trump regime’s Muslim ban (versions 1 and 2.0) was intended to and did send shockwaves of terror around the world. It wasn’t an “alleged” event. It separated families. It cut off the trickle of desperate refugees. It criminalized and demonized a billion Muslims around the world, including in the U.S. It was met with unprecedented outpourings of protest at airports around the country, including by many, many non-Muslims.
And Kelly called incidents, like one where a woman was seized and deported while appearing at a courthouse to make a complaint of domestic violence, “partial or inaccurate media report[s].”
Kelly manipulated and invented statistics, and lied, to portray people in the United States besieged by a hostile world, driven by Islamist ideology or drug trafficking and profiteering, who “despise the United States, because we are a nation of rights, laws, and freedoms. They have a single mission, and that is our destruction.”
Kelly was channeling Nazi media in the period leading up to the Holocaust. Nazi propaganda seized on out-of-context, wildly distorted, or invented “Jewish crime” to create a climate among German civilians, fascist mobs, police and soldiers where Jews were seen as subhuman and dangerous enemies of the German Reich. This in turn set the stage for ethnic cleansing through detention and deportation, and eventually—as those options became untenable—for genocide.
Nazi-style lies and rants like this are not just creating the climate for future horrors, they are being translated into actual policy. No legislative action required, by the way. It is now Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy that possession of marijuana, something that is legal in eight states and DC, and generally considered benign, including probably by significant sections of Trump’s fascist base, is a basis to deport people.
Trump claims DREAMers—people brought to this country as children and who have grown up here undocumented—can “rest easy.” But Attorney General Jeff Sessions says everyone in this country illegally is subject to being deported. When asked about the contradiction, Kelly, who oversees enforcing immigration law and policy, declared: “Everybody in the country illegally is subject to being deported.” And in case that wasn’t clear enough, he declared that DREAMers “are here illegally and subject to deportation, that’s what the law says, my organization has not targeted these so-called [sic] DREAMers... we have more important criminals to go after.” In other words, DREAMers too live under constant danger that any random encounter with law enforcement will get them detained or deported.
Weeks into the Trump regime, a 19-year-old Honduran art student, Josue Romero, with a work permit through DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—people who were brought to the U.S. as children], was arrested by San Antonio, Texas, police February 14 for possession of a small amount of marijuana as he was leaving a park where he’d been skateboarding. Instead of being released on $800 bond as other people usually are, he was arrested by ICE agents and taken to a detention prison. Romero told the Daily Beast that ICE told him he would be deported quickly. “They told me within the next week I would be flying to Honduras ... even when I asked about DACA, they told me there was nothing I could do, that there were no second chances with Trump.” Romero was released from detention after two days but has been put on supervision and must report to ICE authorities. “I can’t describe how I feel. I just want to break down and cry. I was kind of devastated, because I’ve never known a life outside of San Antonio.”
And Sessions is going after sanctuary cities that provide some minimal level of rights and protection for undocumented immigrants, threatening crucial cuts in federal funding if they don’t turn their police and employees of city agencies into ICE agents.
Two Solutions to a World of Borders and Oppression
In his speech, Kelly ranted that people coming to this country “despise the United States, because we are a nation of rights, laws, and freedoms. They have a single mission, and that is our destruction.”
Why do people really come here from around the world? As Bob Avakian puts it in the film of his talk, Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, responding to those in the ruling class who ask why people come here from all over the world, it is “because you have fucked up the rest of the world even worse than what you have done in this country.” (Watch a clip of the video here.)
On one level, what is going on now is not new for the rulers of the U.S. The massive waves of global refugees—the children washing ashore, drowned on European beaches... the desperate mothers and children who have taken the dangerous journey from Central America—are products, first and overwhelmingly, of the workings of this capitalist-imperialist system. Economic, political, military, and environmental devastation inflicted on the world by U.S. imperialism is the direct factor driving millions and millions of refugees from their homes, in desperate search of survival. The workings of imperialism have uprooted people, destroyed traditional means of survival, and driven people into mega-cities of sweatshops, slums, and prostitution.
Global warming has led to desertification of lands where human agriculture arose. And here it must be said, by the way, that while the fascists in the Trump/Pence regime are climate change deniers, they do recognize the destabilizing threat to their system it will produce, and this is a factor in their war on immigrants.
All these horrors are enforced by constant war, torture chambers, assassinations, and pro-U.S. rulers put in place by the U.S. in countries from Honduras in Central America to Egypt in the Middle East.
Today’s massive dislocation of humanity has added to the “stress level” of maintaining the system that created this nightmare. The Trump regime, and the Nazi propaganda in Kelly’s speech, are an implementation of a fascist response to imperialism’s “immigration crisis.” There is a completely different, opposite, solution: an actual revolution, bringing into being a society aimed at ending all exploitation and oppression. That solution is blueprinted in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian.
If for no other reason than what is being done, and what will be done to immigrants, this regime must be driven from power before it can fully and even more deeply tighten its grip on power. And because resistance, let alone an actual revolution to bring about an entirely different and far, far better world, would be much more difficult if this regime locks down its rule.
In the midst of the barrage of “coverage” of Korea in the mainstream imperialist media, one thing to take note of is that many of the “military analysts and experts” who have been featured say that Kim Jong-un and others in the North Korean leadership are not going to launch a “first strike” nuclear attack against the forces of the U.S., South Korea, or Japan. They note that Kim and others know such a strike would certainly lead to the devastation of North Korea and the end of the regime. For instance, William Perry, who was defense secretary under Bill Clinton, said on CNN, “I do not believe that the North Korean regime is suicidal. Therefore I don’t believe they’re going to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on anyone.” These “experts” say that North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons—and missiles capable of delivering them, including over long distances—is essentially for deterrent purposes. They are for deterring (in other words, discouraging or preventing) others from attacking North Korea.
Now, let’s be clear—these U.S. “military analysts and experts” are no “peace advocates” and opponents of American dominance over the world. Their arguments are based on what is best for the interests of U.S. imperialism.
So let’s follow the logic here. If North Korea is not going to launch a “first strike,” then why does it pose such a “threat” and why are its actions “dangerous” or “provocative”? The only logical answer is that the development of nuclear weapons and missiles could serve precisely as a deterrent, and render North Korea less vulnerable to bullying, and possible aggressive military actions, by the U.S. and its allies.So, in reality, the Trump/Pence regime, now at the helm of U.S. imperialism, is threatening and taking actions that could lead to a major—possibly nuclear—war, because an adversary is doing things that might make it less vulnerable to bullying and aggression by these imperialists!!
"The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the U.S. nor of the overwhelming majority of people in the world as a whole. And the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different and better world, for another way."
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:8
Let’s proceed further according to logical, rational thinking: While the North Korean regime is in fact oppressive and not at all a genuine “socialist” or “communist” state, or a force for progress in the world, it is the U.S., ruled now by the Trump/Pence fascist regime, which poses the real, and very dangerous, threat in this situation, and indeed is the greatest oppressor in the world and threat to the future, and very existence, of humanity. This is underlined by the “tour of bellicosity” that Pence just took in the region, even going right to the demilitarized zone in Korea to threaten war.
And, speaking of the danger of a fanatic who’s threatening war—you have it, right there in Mike Pence, a religious fundamentalist lunatic threatening war while representing a system and a fascist regime with its hands on weapons of mass destruction, in fact the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons!
On Saturday, April 29, dozens of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, many of them armed, staged a rally in Pikeville, Kentucky. They were confronted by at least an equal number of defiant anti-fascists who went up against moves by the authorities to intimidate and suppress them. And they took on calls by some local forces to back down in the face of Nazi threats.
Pikeville is a town of 7,000, near the Kentucky-West Virginia border. It is squarely in the largely rural Appalachia region–hours from any big city. The town is 98% white, and voted 80% for Trump. In response to the Nazis’ plan to rally in Pikeville, some local forces called a “Rally for Equality & American Values – A Peaceful Demonstration Against a Hateful Ideology.” But when their “Rally for Equality...” was threatened by armed fascists, the organizers–on the advice of local police–called off their event. The president of the University of Pikeville issued a statement equating the Nazis and the anti-Nazis. He cancelled classes, encouraged students to leave town, and told them not to go downtown. Local authorities passed a special law banning masks and hoods–they explicitly targeted anti-Nazi protesters, invoking protests on January 20 in DC to justify this.
In the face of this intimidation, and capitulation on the part of some forces, anti-fascist activists leafletted the town of Pikeville. They challenged people to stand up to the Nazis. Their statement read, in part:
“To the people of Appalachia, we can’t let hate and fear win. We won’t be scared away from protecting our community from these Nazis. We will still be in downtown Pikeville on Saturday to show these white supremacists that their hateful, violent ideology is not welcome here. We ask that you join us in the streets of Pikeville on Saturday to take a stand against these Nazis preying upon our community. We are stronger together. They will be gathering on the courthouse steps at 2pm, we will be there, please join us. We won’t lie to you. These groups pose a real threat of violence, but history has taught us that the rise of fascism cannot be countered with polite words of disapproval alone.”
And their statement concluded: “Together we can show that Appalachians stand together for a world where all are equal. We will see you in the streets this Saturday.”
On the 29th, in the face of constant police harassment and moves to pen them in, over a hundred people, overwhelmingly whites, defiantly and creatively confronted the Nazis in downtown Pikeville. People chanted “Nazi scum off our streets.” Signs included “No One Wants You Here,” “Antifascists Worldwide United,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Make Racists Afraid Again,” and “Rednecks Against Racism.”
The courageous action made a very important statement in the face of Trump’s America and the ghouls and thugs who are emboldened by the regime.
Never has the need for revolution been more acutely posed than it is now. Today, the fabric of society is being pulled apart all over the world. The ruling classes find themselves in crisis. In the face of this, the Trump/Pence regime has come to power in the U.S. to impose a fascist regime. They are putting into place a violent reinforcement of white supremacy and misogyny in all its forms, with genocidal implications; a brutally aggressive “America First” national chauvinism; and the demonization and severe repression of those who would defy this.
First they came for the people of Muslim faith, banning them from entering this country. Then they came for the millions of people from Mexico and the rest of Latin America living and working in this country without documents, unleashing their pigs to hunt them down, round them up, and deport them.
Deportations under Obama had already reached record proportions, and so had the number of Border Patrol agents. But the Trump/Pence regime is taking this war to a new level. Millions of people are living under police-state conditions, with an atmosphere of terror spreading. Documented and undocumented immigrants are demonized, painted as “criminal aliens” and treated as suspects, often denied basic rights—and their humanity. ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) agents carry out storm trooper raids and roundups, any time and any place, against people whose only “crime” is to come to this country to work and survive. Families are being torn apart, children ripped from their parents. Mob violence and hate crimes are whipped up and let loose. Anyone with a shred of humanity should be horrified by these savage, inhuman assaults.
By Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
Let's go on a crucial journey together—full of unity against oppression and lively struggle about the source of the problem and the solution. Pursue your own convictions—that the outrages that move you are intolerable—to their logical conclusion, and be determined not to stop until those outrages have been eliminated. And if this, as well as learning about other outrages, and ideas about how this all fits together and flows from a common source—and how it could all be ended, and something much better brought into being—leads in the direction of seeing not only the need for bold and determined resistance, but also the need for revolution and ultimately communism, then don't turn away from that because it moves you beyond your comfort zone, challenges what had been your cherished beliefs, or because of prejudices and slanders. Instead, actively seek to learn more about this revolution and its goal of communism and to determine whether it is in fact the necessary, and possible, solution. And then act accordingly.
American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 5:7
There is nothing sacred to us about the USA, as it is presently constituted, or about the borders of the U.S. as they are presently constituted. Quite the opposite.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:20
Internationalism—The Whole World Comes First.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 5:8
» Refuse Fascism—made up of people coming from a diversity of perspectives who recognize that the Trump/Pence regime is fascist, that it poses a catastrophic danger to all of humanity, and that it is our responsibility to mobilize millions to drive it from power.
Los Angeles, May 1. Photo: @mikehudema
We invite you to further explore...
Constitution for the New Socialist
Republic in North America
Authored by Bob Avakian, and adopted by the Central Committee of the RCP
To everyone outraged at and resisting the Trump/Pence regime’s demonization of immigrants and major ratcheting up of repression against them:
Deportations and militarization of the border had already intensified under Obama—but the Trump/Pence regime is taking this war to new, extreme levels. First they came for Muslims, with Trump’s ban... then they came for millions of people from Mexico and Latin America living and working in this country without documents. We’ve seen this fascist march to horror before, with Hitler and the Nazis. For this—and many other reasons—the Trump/Pence regime must be stopped and driven from power as soon as possible. But the answer is not a “less extreme” form of this same system—the system of capitalism-imperialism. To put an end to the war on immigrants and all the horrors people face, we need an actual revolution that sweeps away the system that has white supremacy sewn into its fabric and that can’t exist without super-exploitation of the most oppressed. A revolution that brings into being a whole new state power and a radically new, and much better, society.
There is a viable vision and strategy for this revolution in the new communism brought forward by Bob Avakian (BA). The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by BA, provides a framework and blueprint for a revolutionary power and a society full of vibrant diversity, critical thinking, creativity, and internationalism. A society aiming for a communist world—without one part of society ruling over others, without countries and borders, without all the oppressive relations and ideas that imprison humanity today.
As you fight against the fascists in power who are stepping up the war on immigrants and carrying out many other outrages, seriously check out this Constitution and the movement for an actual revolution. And if you become convinced of the need for revolution, have the courage of your convictions and get with this.
Revcom.us/Revolution newspaper brings alive a scientific analysis of major events in society and the world—why they are happening, how different events and developments relate to each other, how all this relates to the system we live under, where people’s interests lie in relation to all this, how revolution is in fact the solution to all this and what the goals of that revolution are, how different viewpoints and programs relate, positively or negatively, to the revolution that is needed, and how people can move, and are moving, to build toward that revolution. There’s something new here every day. Bookmark us and sign up for a free e-sub.
Bob Avakian (BA) is the architect for a whole new framework for human emancipation, the new synthesis of communism. This new synthesis is based on more than 40 years of revolutionary work critically analyzing and drawing from past revolutionary experience and theory, and a broad range of human activity and thought. It is a continuation of, but also represents a qualitative leap beyond, and in some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed. Bob Avakian has been the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA since its founding in 1975. Find out more.
May Day 2017:
Tens of Thousands Across the U.S. March Against Trump, in Defense of Immigrants
Updated May 2, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In every imperialist country, with the U.S. leading the way, immigrants are demonized and persecuted, and whole peoples are denied their basic humanity and their rights.
The racist vilification, targeting, and persecution of immigrants and refugees have been a leading edge of the Trump/Pence fascist program. On May 1, tens of thousands stepped into the streets in many cities and towns across the U.S. to oppose those assaults, and in opposition to Trump and his regime.
In Los Angeles, the largest of several actions taking place in the city was a march starting at MacArthur Park, in the heart of the Latino immigrant community, and ending at City Hall, with the march stretching block after block. More than 30,000 people converged downtown, according to some news reports.
Thousands turned out in Milwaukee, where, according to one report, they filled the entire 6th Street Viaduct. Among those in the march were students from a couple of local high schools. One of the main demands was for the ouster of Sheriff David Clark, ultra-reactionary upholder of brutalization of Black people and police cooperation with ICE anti-immigrant repression.
More than 4,000 people marched in the rain in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where, according to the New York Times, large sections of the city’s Latino community were shut down, with “Bakeries, markets, restaurants and clothing stores ... shuttered for the day out of solidarity or for lack of workers.”
More than 5,000 marched in Chicago, and there were marches in other larger cities. People were also out in the streets in smaller communities. According to the New York Times, “In Homestead, Florida, where immigrant farmworkers keep fields of zucchini, beans, cherry tomatoes and okra growing, over 1,000 people marched from a park to City Hall.”
There were over a dozen May Day protests and events in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. In San Francisco, hundreds protested at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in the morning, as scores of people blocked driveways chanting “No ban, no raids, no walls—sanctuary for all.” Later in the day, more than 5,000 joined the “Day Without Immigrants” march, taking over the city’s main downtown street, Market Street, for many blocks. Across the Bay, in the largely Latino Fruitvale district in East Oakland, students who walked out of a number of high schools were part of a march of over 3,000 that included a broad range of people of different nationalities, including Black people standing against the attacks on immigrants.
Seventy women at ICE’s Northwest Detention Center near Tacoma, Washington, chose May Day to join an ongoing hunger strike by other detainees there. In New York, NYU students left classes demanding the university become a sanctuary for immigrants, and a protest took place at an immigration court. Hundreds of people from across New Jersey rallied at Liberty State Park in Jersey City.
Protests were also held in Philadelphia; Boston; Washington, DC; Raleigh, North Carolina; Jersey City and Newark, New Jersey; Portland, Oregon; Houston, Texas; and many other cities. They included immigrant and civil rights groups, labor organizations, the movement for a $15 minimum wage, faith groups, community organizations, and immigrants from countries around the world.
People working with Refuse Fascism brought “NO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America!” to many of the demonstrations in the larger cities. And Revolution Clubs had an important presence in marches in Chicago, New York, and other cities.
Philadelphia, PA. Photo: @ericopinion.
International Longshore and Warehouse Union called for May Day Strike on the West Coast. Photo: @SFRefuseFascism.jpg.
May 1 at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. Immigrant laborers and labor unions attended the rally, focusing on defending the rights of immigrants. Photo: @darianworden.
Revolution Club, New York taking out Bob Avakian's The New Communism, talking with people about the new synthesis, in the midst of the New York gatherings. Photo: Special to revcom.us.
Milwaukee, WI.Thousands came together in Milwaukee from a dozen cities to march on May 1, declaring that society can’t function without immigrants, with a sharp edge of anti-Trump sentiment and demanding “Stop the Raids,” stop the deportations, and stop tearing apart families. Many local businesses closed in solidarity, and some entire workforces came together. Some local high schools sent large contingents of students, who joyously brought the noise. One popular chant was: “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!”
The marchers were overwhelmingly Mexican/Spanish-speaking from every age group, with many white progressives and religious forces present. A main demand was the removal/indictment of the hated Sheriff David Clarke, an unapologetic brutalizer and killer of Black people, and second only to former Phoenix, Arizona, Sheriff Arpaio in demonizing immigrants and calling for ICE-ifying the police. People selling Revolución got out 500 copies, while putting a large Refuse Fascism banner in others’ hands to carry, as dozens more took up the NO! posters.
Photo: Voices de la Frontera.
Seattle, WA. Several thousand marched especially in defense of immigrants. Photo: @mtaylorcanfield.
Washington, D.C. Photo: La Jornada, Mexico.
Eugene, Oregon
Thousands marched and rallied in downtown Los Angeles on May Day. The focus was to protest the policies of the Trump/Pence regime and call on people to “Resist.” One march started at MacArthur Park, in the heart of the immigrant community, and ended at the Grand Park across from City Hall. It was the largest of several marches that took place in Los Angeles on May Day. Separate contingents of labor unions, political organizations, and immigrant rights groups, as well as groups of non-affiliated people, chanted all the way along the march. The mood of the crowd was celebratory for May Day, but also very serious in opposing the attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, Black and Latino people, and health care. There were signs supporting Los Angeles as a sanctuary city. The prospect of war and the opposition to war were in the mix. The Refuse Fascism contingent was joyous, exuberant, and defiant as they loudly chanted all 2.3 miles. It was led by a person acting as a drum major and dancing through the streets. The NO! signs were seen throughout the march and in many of the contingents.
Photo: @mikehudema.
Isabel Cardenas speaks at May Day 2017 in Los Angeles.
Students marched at Stanford University in California, proclaiming it a "sanctuary" for immigrants. Photo: @chicodechiseme
May First began in the Bay Area at 8 am when about 300 people blocked the gates at the ICE headquarters in San Francisco, saying they would not stand by quietly while our immigrant brothers and sisters are deported. The Longshoremen, with a long militant history of marking May Day, held a Workers March at which Refuse Fascism spoke. In all, over 5,000 people gathered for a “Day Without Immigrants” march, including a large number of immigrants, contingents of labor unions, and different political groups. Many students, including some who walked out of high school, carried signs saying their parents were immigrants. The march was boisterous with Aztec dancers, brass bands, and many homemade signs, including “No Ban, No Wall. If They Build a Wall, We’ll Build a Tunnel.” There were also signs denouncing police brutality and other issues. A Refuse Fascism contingent galvanized a sentiment that the Trump/Pence regime represents a fascist agenda and needs to be driven out, and the NO! signs could be widely seen throughout the march. The march completely filled Market Street in downtown San Francisco for many, many blocks.
Los Angeles - Refuse Fascism led a contigent as part of the march. Photo: Special to revcom.us.
San Francisco - painting the street "No Ban / No Wall / RESIST". Photo: @Brook Anderson
New York Foley Square. Photo: Special to revcom.us.
More than 5,000 people marched through the streets of Chicago for May Day as part of the Rally for Immigration. The crowd was overwhelmingly made up of Mexican and other Latino people, with a large presence from the Puerto Rican community as well as immigrant rights groups, environmentalists, teachers and other organized labor groups, and more. Many of the high school students carried Mexican flags. Refuse Fascism and the Revolution Club each had very visible contingents. One of the feeder marches met at Cook County Juvenile Detention Center and organizers called it a “protest of the criminalization of young people of color.” Many Chicago businesses in Latino neighborhoods closed so their workers could march. One business posted on its Facebook page: “We oppose the criminalization of immigrants! We all have rights that we are going to exercise!” Photo: @BernieCrats
The Revolution Club Chicago impacted people with their banners and agitation. They chanted and agitated throughout the march, challenging people to get into the revolution, become a part of the Revolution Club, and take up the scientific understanding of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Oakland, California. Early on May 1, several people were arrested protesting at the office of the Alameda County sheriff, who is cooperating with ICE deportations. Students at many high schools had walkouts (above) and joined the main rally and march of over 1,000 people at 3 pm in the largely Latino Fruitvale district in East Oakland. There were groups representing Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino, and Arab immigrants in the march. The Oakland march also had a significant number of Black people who took part to stand with immigrants. Several groups were organizing migra watches and had a training session at the rally. Photo: Special to revcom.us.
In cities and countries around the world, people protested for May Day 2017. Here are initial photos.
May 1, 2017
With the fate of the whole world in the balance,
Humanity Needs
Revolution and
the New Communism!
Never has the need for revolution been more acutely posed than it is now. Today, the fabric of society is being pulled apart all over the world. The ruling classes find themselves in crisis. In the face of this, the Trump/Pence regime has come to power in the U.S. to impose a fascist regime. They are putting into place a violent reinforcement of white supremacy and misogyny in all its forms, with genocidal implications; a brutally aggressive “America First” national chauvinism; and the demonization and severe repression of those who would defy this.
Meanwhile, this whole capitalist-imperialist system wreaks wanton destruction on the planet. This destruction, along with economic plunder of the world and wars for empire, has driven tens of millions of people out of their homelands to seek refuge. Once out, they face death on the high seas or in the desert, because the imperialists have locked down their borders; those who escape are cruelly confined behind stockades and razor wire. In every imperialist country, with the U.S. leading the way, immigrants are demonized and persecuted, and whole peoples are denied their basic humanity and their rights. Further: one half of humanity—women—are daily degraded, exploited, mocked, enslaved, raped, and murdered, everywhere on this planet. Within the U.S., Black and Latino people continue to be brutalized and murdered by police and incarcerated in record numbers—with threats of far worse in store. On top of all this, the Trump/Pence regime now threatens war and brandishes nuclear destruction, intentionally strutting like gangsters and madmen as they do.
BUT—there IS an answer to this madness. There is a way out and a way forward: Bob Avakian’s New Synthesis of Communism gives people the way to understand the world, and transform it through revolution. Bob Avakian—BA—has drawn from the breakthroughs and experience of past revolutions, as well as other forms of human endeavor, and put revolutionary communism on a more scientific foundation. BA has developed a scientific approach to the world that everyone can take up; the strategy that can actually overthrow these imperialists; and the blueprint, once power has been won, for a revolutionary society on the road to ending all oppression, exploitation, and destructive conflicts between human beings.
Workers at May Day rally in Bloemfontein, South Africa call for the South African President Jacob Zuma to step down. (AP photo)
Garment workers at May Day rally in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (AP photo)
Workers try to remove razor wire in order to continue their march towards the presidential palace, Jakarta, Indonesia, Monday, May 1, 2017. The rally called for increasing the minimum wage, banning outsourcing practices, free health care and improved working conditions. (AP photo)
Raising HAYIR (NO) at a May Day protest in Ankara, Turkey.
Protesters and riot police face off as the May Day march approaches the U.S. embassy in Manila, Philippines. (AP photo)
The Battle for Berkeley:
Why it's Right, and Righteous, to Drive
Fascists Off Campus,
Out of Berkeley... and Out of Power!
A Talk and a Challenge to Debate by Sunsara Taylor
Thursday, May 4, 6pm
Hearst Field Annex Building D
Room D37
University of California Campus, Berkeley
Fascists are targeting Berkeley! A series of “intellectual” hitmen for the Trump/Pence regime—Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, David Horowitz—have zeroed in on UC Berkeley. Twice in April, hundreds of ready-to-brawl “alt right” white supremacists, neo-Nazis, bikers and militia descended on downtown Berkeley.
This is not about “free speech.” Far from being persecuted or suppressed by the state for their ideas, the ideas of these fascists are being imposed on the world by the most powerful state in the history of humanity. Every day, the fascist Trump/Pence Regime is slamming ahead to implement precisely the kind of genocidal racism, woman-hating cruelty, war-mongering ambitions, planet-destroying lies, and anti-immigrant ethnic-cleansing these “intellectual” hitmen promote. Free speech? Trump is threatening to gut the separation of powers, repeatedly attacked the press for challenging his regime's “alternative facts” and threatened to strip the citizenship of those who burn the flag. Every day, the Trump/Pence Regime is working feverishly to consolidate a fascist America.
At what point will you say: “NO, this must stop!”?
Berkeley is being targeted precisely because of its radical history. If the fascists can make Berkeley bow down, it will strengthen their ability to make the whole country accept new norms and bend to their will. Ignoring them won't make them go away. Standing aside or keeping your head in your books is unacceptable. That's what the “Good Germans” did during Hitler's rise to power.
Come hear Sunsara Taylor break down why it is not only right, but righteous, to drive fascists off campus, out of Berkeley... and most of all, out of power! Why Berkeley must really become Berkeley again. And, why, in this “Battle for Berkeley,” the right side must win!
Finally, a challenge:
To Robert Reich, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders—or anyone else who wants to join them in defending the “right” of these fascists to spew their bile and fight for their genocidal program—Sunsara Taylor challenges you to debate this. The stakes for humanity are no less than the lives and future of billions.
Sunsara Taylor is a revolutionary communist and follower of Bob Avakian. Avakian, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement, is the architect of the New Communism and is leading a movement for an actual revolution and for a radically new society on the road to real emancipation. Taylor sits on the Advisory Board of RefuseFascism.org and has led thousands in the streets to go up against this fascist regime, aiming to drive it from power.
What does it mean that Donald Trump's hero is Andrew Jackson? A Racist Demagogue, Genocidal Indian Killer, Champion of Slavery
May 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On May 1, Donald Trump continued his long admiration for Andrew Jackson, who Trump sees as a model for his own presidency. Trump made yet another bald-faced racist statement about the Civil War. “I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
Leaving aside these ignorant statements about actual historical facts, what should be drawn from and discussed—and what is not being discussed in the media—is Trump’s vision of an America where unapologetic slaveholders are upheld and the Civil War to end slavery is seen as unfortunate and a war that could have been avoided. A vision of America where the genocide of the Native population for the purpose of opening up land for European settlers to farm and ranch, and the expansion of the American enterprise to the west, is exalted.
This comes from a president who has assembled a regime of racists and xenophobes who openly uphold America as the land for white people and declare their intention to impose this vision on a country undergoing vast demographic and ethnic changes. When their openly stated heroes are the architects of genocides past, one should seriously consider what this will mean for millions of people in their crosshairs now.
It is dangerous, and an insult upon injury, for the New York Times and other liberal pundits to deceive people and claim Trump’s comment shows he has a “...tenuous grasp of the past,” that he is simply ignorant of U.S. history. Really?! It is these liberal mouthpieces who show a refusal to grasp, confront AND call out the Trump/Pence fascist regime. We are reposting an excerpt from “Andrew Jackson: A Racist Demagogue, Genocidal Indian Killer, Champion of Slavery.” It is time to drive out this regime before it’s too late for all of humanity.
EXCERPT
When Trump was elected Rudy “Adolph” Giuliani said: “This is like Andrew Jackson’s victory. This is the people beating the establishment.” And Trump himself weighed in on the legacy of Andrew Jackson while running for president. He opposed replacing Jackson’s face on the $20 bill with that of abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Trump claimed, “Andrew Jackson had a great history.”
What was that history?
The Engine Behind Andrew Jackson: A Voracious Appetite to Expand Slavery
Slavery played an essential role in the rise of the United States as a global power. As Bob Avakian says:
There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.
―BAsics 1:1
Andrew Jackson was president of the United States from 1829-1837. He was a populist hero to large sections of whites, especially in the South, promising them prosperity on the basis of the expansion of slavery, and he promised them land stolen from Native peoples. He appealed to the most backward, narrow, racist sentiments of whites. Jackson railed against “elites” in the North—sections of the established banking and political structure that he saw standing in the way of the rapid expansion of slavery. His presidency was a vehicle through which slavery expanded dramatically into lands from which Native peoples were expelled by the U.S. military, and subjected to genocidal “relocation” from the South to Oklahoma.
Under Jackson's presidency, Native peoples were expelled by the U.S. military, and subjected to genocidal “relocation” from the South to Oklahoma as illustrated on this map.
In the winter of 1831, the Choctaw were force-marched from Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana to reservations in Oklahoma, some bound in chains and marched double file. Thousands died along the way on this "trail of tears."
Genocide...
Once in office, Jackson championed and carried out brutal crimes against Native peoples. White settlers, some of whom were already settling illegally on Native lands, pressured the federal government to remove Indians from the Southeast to make their lands available.
Some 125,000 Native peoples lived on those lands that had been guaranteed to them through treaties. Jackson was able to gain Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the government to extinguish Indian title to lands in the Southeast.
In 1831, the Choctaw became the first Nation to be removed. In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the Choctaw were force-marched from Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana to reservations in Oklahoma on foot. Some were bound in chains and marched double file. They were marched without food, supplies or other help from the government. Thousands died along the way. It was, one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a “trail of tears and death.”
This genocidal crime was the model for additional ethnic cleansing to open up new territory for slave production of cotton. The Creeks were driven from Georgia, Alabama, and Florida in 1834. The Chickasaw were driven out of Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee in 1836. And lastly, in the infamous “Trail of Tears,” the Cherokee were force-marched from Georgia to Oklahoma in 1838. 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on the way.
Jackson famously tried to justify this with philosophical babble proclaiming, “But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.” In other words, even though it might seem immoral to kill off the Native peoples, these supposedly “lesser” people must die so others could prosper.
...And a Dramatic Expansion of Slavery
The removal of Native peoples from their southeastern lands served a dramatic expansion and intensification of slavery.
The "whipping machine" was both a literal machine that whipped Black slaves to force them to pick more and more cotton, and also a metaphor for the unceasing and inhuman torture inflicted every hour, every day, under slavery.
Andrew Jackson’s presidency marked a massive expansion of slavery, accomplished along with and through the most extreme racist populism. Photo: Florida archives
In The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward Baptist writes that in the eight years following Jackson's election, “U.S. government, the states, banks, private citizens, and foreign entities had collectively invested about $400 million, or one-third of the value of all U.S. economic activity in 1830 into expanding production on slavery’s frontier. This includes the price of 250,000 slaves moved, 48 million new acres of public land sold, the costs of Indian removals and wars, and the massive expansion of southwestern financial infrastructure. The number of hands on cotton plantations expanded dramatically, and the need to repay loans only accelerated the whipping-machine, collectively forcing the total picking that hands could accomplish just a little higher each day."
As Baptist recounts in his book, the “whipping machine” was both a literal machine that whipped Black slaves to force them to pick more and more cotton, and also a metaphor for the unceasing and inhuman torture inflicted every hour, every day, under slavery.
And speaking of the transformations that took place under Andrew Jackson, Baptist writes: "In 1830, the United States made 732,000 bales. As the harvest kicked into high gear in the fall of 1836, men who made a living by gambling on cotton were predicting a deluge of 1.5 million bales, each one a 400 pound snowy semi-cube wrapped in canvas. This was 600 million pounds of clean cotton—or, expressed in a different way more than six million person days of picking under the hot sun.”
* * *
Andrew Jackson’s presidency marked a massive expansion of slavery, made possible through massive violent ethnic cleansing of Native peoples. And this was accomplished along with and through the most extreme racist populism—appealing to and mobilizing large numbers of dispossessed white men by appealing to their basest and most narrow interests.
The fact that people like Rudolph Giuliani, from their own fascist perch, and Trump himself celebrate the legacy of Andrew Jackson foreshadows the kinds of hellish transformations a Trump-Pence regime would mean in the nature of U.S. society. That cannot be allowed to happen.
U.S. Department of IN-Justice Rules That Police Murder of Alton Sterling Was "Reasonable"
May 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On July 5 last year, cops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, pulled up on Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man, in a parking lot. Within minutes, the cops tackled Sterling to the ground, tased him, fired six bullets into him at point-blank range—three in the back—and killed him. His supposed “crime”? Selling DVDs outside a store. The whole world saw the video of the horrendous murder by pigs in blue. And the whole world saw people rise up in days of powerful protests in Baton Rouge, in the face of repression by heavily armed riot police.
Now, 10 months later, the howling injustice of the killing of Alton Sterling has received a stamp of approval from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which announced on May 3 that no federal charges will be brought against the two cops involved. The Baton Rouge police had put those two cops on “paid administrative leave” after they killed Sterling, and so far, they have not faced any local or state charges for their wanton crime.
The DOJ’s justification for their outrageous decision was that the “law requires that the reasonableness of an officer’s use of force on an arrestee be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with added perspective of hindsight.” In their eyes, what those Baton Rouge cops did to Alton Sterling met the standard of legal action by police—any “reasonable officer” would have acted in the same way, they say.
“Reasonable”?!? “Legal”?!? The DOJ rationalization for the police murder of Alton Sterling speaks volumes about the laws and the role of cops under this system. The whole way that the laws are set up and used essentially puts a stamp of approval on police murder. This points very directly to the fact that the brutality, terror, and even murder—especially against Black, Latino and other oppressed people and those on the bottom of society generally—are considered normal and legal day-to-day operations of the police, as armed enforcers for a system of exploitation and oppression.
Only two days after Alton Sterling’s life was cut down in Baton Rouge, police in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, shot and murdered another Black man, Philando Castile, as he sat in a car with his fiancée and her four-year-old daughter. These murders—and many others just that summer, and many, many more year after year—are part of the constant terror carried out by the police against Black, Brown, and other oppressed people. And in case after case, the murdering pigs are let off free to roam the streets, their crimes declared by the system’s courts and institutions as “legitimate” and “reasonable” actions of a force “doing their job.”
A system that does this over and over again is criminal, immoral and illegitimate. We need an actual revolution to overthrow this system of capitalism-imperialism and bring into being a radically different society.
And now at the top of this system is the Trump/Pence regime, intent on further unleashing law enforcement forces around the country as part of the fascist “making America great again” agenda—with a DOJ headed up by Attorney General Sessions, who is moving quickly on his pledge to squash any criticism of and restrictions on police. The fight for justice for Alton Sterling and all the other victims of the killer police is part of the urgent struggle to stop the fascist regime and drive it out of power as soon as possible.
The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.
In the near future, fascist military officers, seizing on a crisis triggered by declining fertility rates and using an alleged terrorist attack as a pretext, take power in most of what was the United States. They establish the “Republic of Gilead,” a Christian fascist society in which biblical law and patriarchal values—as updated and interpreted by the new rulers—are increasingly imposed.
A law is passed barring women from having bank accounts or credit cards; their finances will be handled by men. Then women are fired en masse from their jobs. Soon armed enforcers and hidden spies are everywhere. Borders are sealed. Escape, resistance, even dissent, is ruthlessly suppressed—hanged bodies appear around the city. Over the course of five years, society is completely locked down. Women are assigned strict roles—some bear children, some do household work, some heavy and dangerous labor. And some—the “aunts”—indoctrinate others to accept all this. Fear—of the authorities, of other women, of betrayal—permeates life completely.
Even as this happens, while some resist, most go along, either stunned into paralysis or unable to believe it is really happening. Over time it becomes “normal.” One of the “aunts” tells women under her “care”: ‘“Ordinary’ is just what you’re used to. This may not seem ordinary to you right now, but after a time, it will. This will become ordinary.”
This is the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, a new original TV series. The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction... sort of. It’s based on the 1986 novel by Margaret Atwood, and watching it evokes visceral outrage because of its similarities to what is happening in the U.S. right now.
The Handmaid’s Tale is streaming on Hulu.com; three episodes were released on April 26, and a new one will be released each Wednesday. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it is well worth subscribing to Hulu for this. I recommend having friends and family come over to watch and discuss the first three episodes together, and then read the Call to Action for Refuse Fascism and ask people to join and financially contribute to Refuse Fascism. They will be feeling plenty motivated!
Stand Against the Fascist Onslaught of Trump and Pence and the Collaborationist Mexican Government
May 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The original Spanish version of this text was downloaded from the blog of the Organización Comunista Revolucionaria, México, on May 1, 2017. The translation is the responsibility of revcom.us.
We cannot let ourselves get used to or remain silent regarding the aggressions of the new government in Washington. This regime is trying to impose fascism: a qualitatively more brutal, repressive and belligerent way of governing, in order to reinforce the same criminal capitalist-imperialist system and domination of the United States in the world. They blatantly whip up racist hatred against Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks, Latinos, native peoples, and other peoples “of color.” They promote misogyny and the subjugation of women by men, and they vilify LGBTT people. They incite violent assaults on people from all these sections of the oppressed, and they act from the state level to subjugate, expel, imprison, or murder them. They hunt down, deport or imprison immigrants, separating families and creating terror in their communities. They fire their missiles at Syria, not because the death of children pains them (on the contrary: Trump praised the killing of children in Yemen by the U.S. in February), but to intimidate their rivals and minions, in order to strengthen their power in the world. They threaten with their nuclear arsenal, attack science and try to replace objective truth with falsehoods that sow gloom and stupidity in society. This regime represents a big danger to humanity, and to stop it will take a torrent of struggle in Mexico and around the world.
The Fascist Regime Attacks Mexico
They defame Mexicans, calling us “drug traffickers, rapists, and murderers,” demonizing a whole people as “guilty” of the horrors that their own system has created. At the same time, they try to impose a more direct and tougher control of U.S. imperialism over Mexico. If this regime is not driven from power, it will carry out its threats of massive deportations and detentions, open terror against immigrants, the wall, and a sort of “war zones” on the northern and southern borders of Mexico, more military and political interference, and greater exploitation, looting and destruction of Mexico by U.S. capital.
As the loyal servants of capitalism-imperialism that they are, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Luis Videgaray Caso [Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Relations], and his whole government conciliate and collaborate with this fascist regime, without protesting the criminalization of Mexicans, the aggressions against Mexico, much less the crimes of the United States in others parts of the world. Peña Nieto insists that they are forging “a positive bond” with the Trump regime. They say they support the deportees while in reality they are just giving some of them a sandwich and maybe a ticket to get somewhere—where for the vast majority of them, there will be no way to make a living. According to media reports, the collaboration of Videgaray (appointed Secretary of Foreign Relations because he is “friend” of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law) even went to the extreme of helping to draft Trump’s speech when presenting the anti-immigrant “executive order” on January 25! Then, he acts like he’s “defending Mexico’s sovereignty” because he advised John Kelly (U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security) to stop commenting on the Mexican presidential elections. This same John Kelly threatened to take the children away from their mothers if they cross the border. Is this Peña Nieto’s “positive bond”? According to Kelly, “Mexico has been a good ally of the United States on the immigration issue.” He is referring to the fact that Mexican forces hunt down and deport Central American migrants, doing the U.S.’s dirty work on a larger scale since the Obama administration.
“Get Out Trump. Get Out Enrique Peña Nieto.”
The same capitalist-imperialist system, with the United States in the lead, has forced millions of people around the world to emigrate, fleeing from the misery, violence and destruction caused by this system’s wars for empire and its “investments” that rob the peasants of their lands, destroy the environment, distort the economy, and don’t let large sections of people live in Mexico, Central America, and many other oppressed countries. These scourges facilitate the rise of drug trafficking, and the Mexican state and the U.S. state (with the DEA, the CIA, the police, etc.) collude with the cartels, while murdering, disappearing and imprisoning innocent people in the name of “combating organized crime.” In addition to forcibly expelling people from their countries of origin, the system depends on the work of immigrants who arrive in the United States (and who do not die trying to do so). These immigrants do the most backbreaking work for minuscule wages providing the system bigger profits and competitive advantages in the world. The U.S. also benefits from the work of scientists, doctors, technicians, artists, researchers, and others who emigrate because the United States has a concentration of greater resources and opportunities to work in the spheres where they have studied, due to the wealth extracted from its “empire.”
To imperialism and to the fascist regime that demonizes the migrants, we say: YOU ARE THE BIGGEST CRIMINALS IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY. You have massacred millions of people in your constant wars for empire and have brutally exploited and condemned to misery billions of people around the world. In your own country, the United States, the police murder Black, Latino and immigrant youths and imprison them en masse in what is a form of slow genocide, which now threatens to accelerate. WE WILL NOT TOLERATE YOUR RACIST ATTACKS ON IMMIGRANTS AND OPPRESSED PEOPLES IN THE U.S. OR YOUR AGGRESSIONS AGAINST THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD!
The Trump/Pence regime is trying to impose fascism, which represents the same capitalist-imperialist system, but with a drastic change in the way of governing and in the “norms” or “values” that govern society. As the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, states,
Fascism is the exercise of blatant dictatorship by the bourgeois (capitalist-imperialist) class, ruling through reliance on open terror and violence, trampling on what are supposed to be civil and legal rights, wielding the power of the state, and mobilizing organized groups of fanatical thugs, to commit atrocities against masses of people, particularly groups of people identified as “enemies,” “undesirables,” or “dangers to society.” (revcom.us)
White Supremacy—Cornerstone of American Fascism
This fascist regime is trying to reaffirm and strengthen white supremacy (a founding principle of the United States) in the face of the weakening of the traditional fabric of society due to immigration, the intensification of the oppression of Blacks, Latinos and others, increased resistance in recent years by Black people, among other problems for the ruling class. The fascists want a “white country.” With massive deportations and open terror, they are trying to reduce the number of immigrants and people of “color” and subjugate them more. They mobilize their social base around white supremacy, and then impose it violently on society in general. Its racist and xenophobic harangues include the statement by a Republican in the House of Representatives, and Trump supporter, that: “We cannot rebuild our civilization with the babies of others”; and the racist and xenophobic harangues of Trump and Jeff Sessions (the Attorney General) that they are deporting drug traffickers and “criminal gangsters,” the “garbage that has turned U.S. cities and suburbs into war zones.” That’s how genocidal murderers talk. That’s how Hitler criminalized the Jews, before locking them up and then exterminating them.
They actually deport working people like Guadalupe García Rayos. She was detained inside the ICE offices in Phoenix, Arizona, while reporting in as she had routinely been doing for six years. Suddenly, after living 22 years in the U.S., Guadalupe was deported to Mexico, suddenly and violently separated from her two children, both U.S. citizens, despite the fact that hundreds of people rushed to try to prevent her deportation. Or people like Daniel Ramírez Medina, a Mexican youth who was detained and is in danger of being deported, despite having the temporary “deferred deportation” permission (“Dreamers”). When Daniel showed the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents his permit, they replied, “That makes no difference. You weren’t born in this country.” Then they accused him of being a “gang member” for having a run-of-the-mill tattoo.
Or look at the case of Félix Torres, a Mexican and legal permanent resident for 30 years. On March 27 at 6:20 in the morning, he opened the door to his home in Chicago, upon hearing an uproar outside. He was immediately shot by ICE agents and hospitalized in critical condition. Officers broke into his house, pointed guns at his children and grandchildren, and forcefully threw them all out, despite being born in the U.S. Their “legal” status did not protect them from ICE terror. With raids like this, this fascist regime is sending a message: “We are going to terrorize and hunt down immigrants, and anyone who looks like an immigrant. It makes no difference whether you haven’t committed any serious crime; it doesn’t make any difference whether you have papers or some temporary legal permit; it doesn’t make a difference even when you are a citizen. It doesn’t make any difference how much you have worked, how honest you are, nor that your children love you and need you. We can arrest you, we can deport you, or we can kill you in cold blood.”
“United States First” —Aggression Against the World to Shore Up Its Empire
“United States First” is the leading-edge slogan of this fascist regime. Far from being “isolationist,” it augurs more aggression and coercion against other countries and peoples with the goal of remaking relations and strengthening its power in the world. They threaten to use extreme measures to achieve this, faced with the big problems that they are facing. Which problems? The U.S. is bogged down in wars for empire in much of the world, locked in bloody contention with the also reactionary Islamic jihadism. In addition, it faces the challenges of the economic and military rise of China and the rivalry with imperialist powers like Russia and some European countries. (revcom.us) Aggressions and increased political and military interference in Mexico are happening in this broader context.
“He is not my president.”
Building the Wall (and “Make Mexico Pay For It!”) became a cry that resonated in Trump’s campaign, stirring up anti-Mexican xenophobia. With their typical lies, in Trump’s and his secretaries’ rants, they claim “enemies,” “criminals” and “terrorists” are pouring across the southern U.S. border. This border is actually one of the most fortified and guarded borders in the world, but the fascist regime is preparing to make its wall of ignominy longer, higher and presumably more impassable, along with deploying five thousand more agents from the border patrol and more surveillance and repression equipment. In addition to serving as a racist assault (and insult) against Mexicans, the wall is part of “securing the border” in the face of the danger of increased migration and other problems for controlling it, which will increase due to the reactionary wars and much more ravages that will be caused by their system with the extreme measures that this regime intends to take. They also reinforce and militarize their southern border against possible massive migrations of victims of upheavals caused by global warming, which disproportionately affects oppressed countries, and at the same time these fascists deny that global warming exists and implement policies that accelerate it.
The “secret” meeting of the commanders of the Northern Command and the Southern Command of the U.S. armed forces with anonymous Mexican authorities in Tapachula, Chiapas, in February this year underlines that U.S. imperialism’s “interests” extend far beyond its own border. Furthermore, the threat by Trump (denied by the U.S. federal government but corroborated by anonymous sources from both countries), to send U.S. military forces to Mexico if the Mexican armed forces do not control the “bad hombres” of organized crime, is a sign of potential greater direct intervention.
They also want more exploitation and economic control of Mexico. For example, by insisting on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Trump has made it very clear that the U.S. demands greater advantages for exploiting, trade with and controlling Mexico. The Treaty’s 22 years have greatly increased economic and political domination by imperialism, the ruin of the countryside, the uprooting of indigenous communities, the accelerated destruction of the environment, greater wage inequality, millions more in poverty, millions forced to emigrate to the U.S., and millions deported when they can no longer exploit them profitably.
But of course, Peña Nieto’s lackey government is “optimistic” about NAFTA. As head of the Mexican state, Peña Nieto represents the interests of the ruling classes: the big Mexican capitalists and landowners, and the imperialists. The Mexican state is an accomplice of U.S. imperialism and the fascist regime: it maintains economic and financial relations for imperialist exploitation and domination and exerts brutal repression over the Mexican people. It is also complicit in repressing and deporting Central American migrants, and in defending U.S. interests in the world—for example, now they are promoting in the OAS [Organization of American States] attempts to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro government in Venezuela, which is a nuisance to the U.S.
Stop the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime and Prepare the Revolution
We cannot stand idly by as they try to impose fascism in the United States and advance their plans for monstrous crimes against people around the world. They tell us, “Just worry about yourself and about your people,” in order to divide and conquer: we must look out for everyone and fight together against fascism. From the level of state power, they have tried to fool the people, proclaiming that Trump would not be a candidate, that he would not win, and now that he is not going to implement the fascist program that he has been proclaiming. These are lies and we cannot wait to protest until they have made further advances in drowning the voices of protest and opposition. To think or pretend that this fascist regime is only “over there” [i.e., in the United States] and “will not affect us” [i.e., the people in Mexico] would mean closing your eyes to the real world: the capitalist-imperialist system governs the whole world and respects no borders; the U.S. is the most powerful imperialist power, Mexico is its “backyard” and has been dominated by the U.S. for a century. Even before the imperialist era, the U.S. stole half of Mexican territory in 1848.
“LONG LIVE MEXICO.” Image of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and his wife, waving the U.S. flag.
There will only be fundamental change for the people by breaking this domination. A communist revolution is necessary that overthrows the Mexican state, confiscates the property of the ruling classes, pulls Mexico out of the world capitalist-imperialist system, and takes the socialist road, uprooting the oppression of women, of indigenous peoples and of Afro-Mexicans, leaving behind all the unnecessary suffering inflicted by this system, and supporting this revolution in other countries, with the final goal of emancipating all humanity.*
As an indispensable part of preparing this revolution, of preparing the people, the terrain and building the communist revolutionary party that is needed to lead it, we need to mobilize broad sections of the people against the attacks of the Trump/Pence regime and join the struggle in the U.S. and the world to drive out this regime, before it is consolidated and imposes fascism. The fascists are in power, but they have not yet been able to fully implement their plan. It makes a big difference to the masses of people of the world if they are prevented from achieving this, because of the atrocities this entails and because, if they succeed, it will become much more difficult to advance in the revolutionary struggle for the emancipation of humanity.
A torrent of struggle from below in the U.S., Mexico and the world, free of conciliating and collaborationist bourgeois politicians, can stop fascism in its tracks and expose the capitalist-imperialist system and the Mexican state defending it. It is not true that we cannot do anything: Imagine the impact, in Mexico, in the U.S. and in the world, if there were thousands in the streets in Mexico calling out fascism in the U.S. and the collaborationism of the Mexican government and making common cause with the struggle of our sisters and brothers on the other side of the border and all over the world!
We, the “enemies” demonized by Trump and his regime, we, who have no interest in maintaining this system of big inequalities and injustices, need to stand up and shout out to the world that, We will not conciliate, we will not collaborate, and we will not capitulate in the face of the attacks of the fascist regime in the U.S.! We will fight along with all the other “undesirables,” in the United States and throughout the world, to stop fascism and to drive this regime out of power, along with its collaborators, the criminal Mexican state.
Get Out Trump, Get Out Peña Nieto, Down With The Whole System!
Aurora Roja, Voice of the Organización Comunista Revolucionaria, México
*See La Revolución Liberadora, Orientación estratégica y programa básico [The Liberating Revolution, Strategic Orientation and Basic Program], available in Spanish at http://aurora-roja.blogspot.com.[regresa]
The original Spanish version of this text was received from the Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia. The translation is the responsibility of revcom.us.
A real REVOLUTION is necessary, and possible
May 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
May 1, 2017
There is much that is at stake this May Day. There are big difficulties and dangers before the people and the planet itself, but there are also possibilities for big favorable transformations that depend on whether or not problems are approached with the approach and method of the science of revolution. The advances in the struggle around this would be the best tribute on the centenary of the October Revolution in Russia.
Talking about the dangers and difficulties of the situation is not a rhetorical statement: a fascist regime seeks to consolidate itself in the most powerful country on the planet... a serious threat of nuclear war hovers on the horizon... there are risks that it is no longer possible to control global warming due to the enthronement of climate change deniers... the misery and dangers generated by imperialism in the countries of the so-called third world makes more than one million people risk their lives every year in forced displacements to Europe... patriarchal oppression in a multitude of forms not only increases but is normalized...
The question of the need for and the possibility of revolution is not a rhetorical statement either. Yes, in spite of healthy outbursts of resistance, the trend towards COUNTER-revolution throughout the world has been consolidating itself, and the revolutionary movement itself is at a crossroads, between the revolutionary road and the dead-ends of bourgeois-democratic reformism and zombie dogmatism that by not letting “the dead bury their dead,” are becoming a residue of the past which contributes to making it difficult to reverse the current trend.
But on the basis of the scientific assessment of the great achievements and also of the limitations of the experiences (and theory) of the first stage of proletarian revolution, as well as of the understanding most widely attained by humanity since then, today a new framework for revolution has been achieved: the new synthesis of communism developed by Bob Avakian, which has put on a more scientific basis the revolutionary communism developed by Marx, Lenin and Mao. To make revolution, you need science.
People do not spontaneously understand the real nature of things; they do not look for the essence that lies beneath the appearance of things. It is crucial that there is a scientific approach and method (i.e., based on evidence, not on formulas, recipes or desires, nor on inferences based on biases) and that there is a growing body of organized people who really apply that science to understand and transform natural and social reality, towards an actual revolution, with sights on the emancipation of all of humanity. To make revolution requires an organized core that leads it.
As Ardea Skybreak emphasizes: “When people are deprived of a scientific approach to reality as a whole, they are robbed of both a full appreciation of the beauty and richness of the natural world and the means to understand the dynamics of change not only in nature but in human society as well.” Not having a scientific approach and method matters, a lot!
For example: Almost everywhere revolutionary communists face unfounded criticisms of the internationalist approach: “let’s first worry about what is happening here” (“my country,” “my region”), “what do the problems of other countries have to do with what happens here?... and so on ad nauseam, while those who criticize (even from the “revolutionary” camp) have no other, more complete or better analyses and/or syntheses about “what is going on here.” This way of thinking is linked to seeing the world (this capitalist-imperialist system) as a mere collection of countries.
Although chauvinism, localism, provincialism, and similar isms account for such recurrent thinking, a lot of people also reject the revolutionary solution, since in other cases the complaints are why do you only worry about women’s problems, or young people’s problems, or the problems of the universities, or the problems of the neighborhoods, or the cities, or the countryside, etc., depending on the actual struggle you are in... and, at the same time!, with complaints about why enclose them within something as broad as the current economic and social system.
Internationalism is not only a good idea; it has a very material basis. There really is a world imperialist system that is the common enemy of the people, whether it resides in imperialist citadels, where the imperialist beast is centered and has its foundations, or whether it resides in the large areas called the “third world,” the dependent and colonial countries.
The changes in recent decades, mainly a product of a new and greater globalization, make this clearer. “The proletariat in advancing the struggle can only advance it by approaching it, and seeking to advance it, on a world level first of all. This doesn't mean of course that you try to make revolution irrespective of the conditions in different parts of the world or the conditions within particular countries, but it means that even in approaching that you proceed from the point of view of the world arena as most decisive and the overall interests of the world proletariat as paramount. And that is not merely a good idea. It has a very material foundation, which has been laid by the system of imperialism.”1 Internationalism has a very material foundation that has been laid by the system of imperialism.
Proletarian internationalism is actually based on a concrete material reality. “[T]he world arena actually [is] decisive in terms of setting the basic conditions for revolutionary struggles, in particular countries as well as on a world level. On the other hand, this does not liquidate, eliminate, or diminish the importance of the revolutionary struggles in particular countries but in certain important respects gives a different focus to them and, yes, gives emphasis to a necessary concentration on those places where the objective and subjective factors combine to make it more possible to make breakthroughs.”2
It is also very important to emphasize that putting the international situation and the international arena first does not mean that in a specific country nothing can be done—and specifically that a revolutionary struggle cannot advance or possibly the revolutionary seizure of power cannot even be carried out—if at any given moment the international “correlation of forces” is not favorable.
An example of where things are decided “from here,” and also an example of dependency and subjugation, is the pathetic “casual encounter” in Mar-a-Lago (Florida, U.S.A.) by former Colombian presidents Pastrana and Uribe with Donald Trump to ask him to make his other pawn, current Colombian president Santos, toe the line, who is only developing a right-wing, and not a fascist, agenda.
As the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, points out, Fascism is an even more grotesque and overtly bloodthirsty form of the same system, which represents horrors for humanity and the planet, beyond what the current system already inflicts daily. This relationship of being qualitatively different, while sharing a common essence, constitutes “a unity of opposites.” What has been happening in the United States is not simply the transfer of power from one bourgeois to another. As a way of governing, fascism solves the contradiction between the essence and the appearance of bourgeois democracy by exercising the open form of bourgeois class dictatorship. It is a qualitative change.
Trump seeks to bludgeon his way to a new world order. In the same world that Colombia (and Peru, Syria, etc.) are part of. It is not only a problem of the people in the United States that a section of the ruling classes has come to take the reins of power which seeks to consolidate a fascist regime in the most powerful country in the world. This has serious and immediate (and long-term) planetary implications.
The threat of nuclear war with North Korea is getting real serious when the country that makes the threat is the United States, the only country that has already used nuclear weapons (against Japan in 1945), and which already killed more than three million Koreans in 1950-1953... And just weeks ago in Afghanistan, for the first time it used the most powerful bomb in its non-nuclear arsenal.
But there are many who are aware at different levels of the gravity of the situation, including the renewed and increased attacks on women, against science and truth, against scientists investigating climate change, against critical thinking, etc. The resistance in the United States, with worldwide repercussions, began the day after Trump’s inauguration with the Women’s March (January 21), then the March for Science (April 22) and the People’s Climate March (April 29), with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the main marches. Although this important response should not be overestimated, much less can it be downplayed.
An important favorable aspect of the situation in the United States is that there are revolutionary communists in that country, organized in a vanguard party and with a revolutionary leadership. (It is always enriching to consult the RCP’s newspaper: revcom.us, in Spanish and English.) For the revolutionary communists there, “The approach... in taking fascism on is not to return to what ‘was’ in Obama/Clinton, but to move forward toward replacing the whole goddamn system and bring about a radically different and far better society.” In contrast, the “united front against fascism” approach, in the 1930s and 1940s (and still among those who groundlessly criticize the RCP) erroneously separated fascism from the capitalist-imperialist system.
In Colombia, the trend towards fascistization took shape in the two Uribe governments (2002-2010) and has once again been on the rise becoming more integrated with religious fundamentalist movements. The fascistic sectors grew larger with the victory of the NO in the October plebiscite that sought to approve the Havana peace accords [with the FARC guerrillas], emboldened by the strength gained by Uribe’s followers and the religious fundamentalists in the marches against the so-called “gender ideology” and against corruption (of which their leaders are protagonists), perhaps longing to emulate the “march on Rome” that enthroned Mussolini.
In general, the process of the rightward shift seeks to defend and also goes hand in hand with the clampdown on the material conditions of life of the vast majority of the population. Billions of people live (survive) in precarious conditions, with grossly low incomes, and almost one billion suffer from starvation (mainly in Africa), while the daily expenditure to keep the military machinery running would be enough to meet for nine days the needs of food, health and education of the poor children of the planet.
With an organization of the production that even uses the environment on the basis of profit, ecosystems are on the verge of collapsing. The creativity of the working masses is constantly extinguished and marginalized. Women are turned into sex slaves, into trafficked products, and are denigrated, and violence against them has even been institutionalized in many parts. The attack on truth and science, the rise of the “post-truth” and such things reinforce the ideological offensive against revolution and communism, the only real way out of this madness.
Four decades since the end of the first stage of revolution, the slanders, distortions, and crude lies about socialism and communism are just becoming sharper. And the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia demands as well the sharpening up of fight to set the record straight in this regards.
Communist revolution aims to eliminate the capitalist-imperialist system and replace it with a radically different economic and political system, socialism. Socialist society is a transition, as part of a protracted world process, to reach communism, a world without exploitation, oppression and antagonistic social divisions. This revolution is the only real solution to horrors such as wars for empire, oppression of women, of oppressed nationalities, of immigrants, and the destruction of the environment... none of which can be solved under this system.
Communism is the achievement of the “4 Alls,” as summed up in a concentrated way by Marx, who specifically said that socialism is the transition towards the abolition of all class differences, of all relations of production on which they rest, of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, and the revolutionization of all ideas that correspond to those social relations. Nothing to do with “twenty-first century socialism,” “social-democracy,” “anti-neoliberalism,” or other reformist silliness!
The contrast is clear with respect to what is a prelude to growth of the rightward shift in the world... And the challenges are big. There is a “window of opportunity” for revolutionaries in the belly of the imperialist beast to advance in their efforts to lead thousands and then millions in a movement for revolution in order to stop the Trump/Pence regime, before it consolidates itself. The call to “wait and see” is criminal. The people of the United States and around the world need support all over the world in order to make real the possibilities of victory. There is no guarantee of victory. But what is guaranteed is that without struggle, the perspectives could not get any worse.
A better world is possible, a communist world!
Revolution, nothing less, is necessary!
Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia — May 1, 2017
A Filmed Dialogue Between Cornel West & Bob Avakian—Revolution and Religion: The Fight For Emancipation and the Role of Religion
Three Reasons Why You Need To Be In the House For the Film Showing of a Dialogue Between Bob Avakian and Cornel West
May 4, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
First, because you’ve never heard anyone like Bob Avakian! Bob Avakian has developed a whole new framework for the emancipation of all humanity. He’s the leader of the revolution in this country. He talks about that and what has to be done to get free. How could you miss it?
Second, because you’ll see and hear Bob Avakian and Cornel West, the revolutionary Christian, rolling up their sleeves and dialoguing together, exploring some of the important things they agree on and some of the important things they don’t agree on. How could you not want to be there?
Third, you’ll hear what they have to say on a topic, Revolution and Religion: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion, that matters to billions of people. What is religion’s place, what is its role in relation to fighting injustices and in advancing towards truly emancipatory social revolution? Can religion help with this? Or is it a hindrance and gets in the way? These are some of the questions Bob Avakian and Cornel West bat around and explore together, sharing their points of unity as well as their differences with a broad audience. Again, how could you not want to be there?
Come see the film and talk with members of the Revolution Club.
Becoming Normal? Modifying His Agenda? Failing?
NO! Trump Doubles Down at Harrisburg
May 4, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
If you think the “gravity” of the presidency is bringing Trump to his “senses” and turning him into a “normal” president...
that Bannon and the fascists have been sidelined...
that Trump’s presidency is failing and the resistance is “winning”...
that Trump is just a buffoon...
Then you need to listen to Trump’s speech in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania last Saturday and come to your senses!
Trump marked the first 100 days of his presidency by flying to a rally of supporters in Harrisburg and doubling downon his fascist agenda. “Make no mistake,” he bellowed. “We are just beginning in our fight to make America great again.” He gave a bellicose speech aimed at whipping up and solidifying a fascist base behind his program—the fascist remaking of U.S. society and governance.
Attacking Liberals and the Media: “time to drain the swamp”
Trump started by denouncing the media as a “disgrace” and, along with the Washington establishment and their Hollywood supporters, part of a “swamp” that needed to be “drained.” He bragged about skipping the White House Correspondents' Dinner, an annual ritual of ruling class fellowship taking place that evening that presidents usually attend. He told his audience of “lock-her-up,” “build-the-wall,” “USA, USA, USA” racists, xenophobes and misogynists that he would much rather be with them—the “much better people.”
This wasn’t just Trump venting. Destroying the pillars of the existing liberal bourgeois order like the media is a key part of consolidating fascist rule, with its open terrorism and disregard for the rule of law, people’s basic rights, and truth itself.
Depicting Immigrants as “Criminals” That Need to Be “Eradicated”
The attack on the media was a warm-up for going after the rest of the world. “We are not going to let other countries take advantage of us anymore,” he said—as if America, grown rich and powerful off exploiting the land, labor, and resources of countries across the globe, is the one being taken advantage of.
Then in remarks barely covered in the mainstream media, Trump launched into a vitriolic assault on immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central and Latin America. This was on the eve of nationwide May 1 demonstrations in support of the rights and humanity of immigrants. Trump claimed that violent “transnational gangs” were responsible for drugs and “illegals” that are “pouring in” to the U.S. He declared, “We are eradicating the criminals and cartels that have infiltrated our country.”
But his real target is all immigrants, the millions whose blood and bones have been crucial building blocks of this country and all its wealth and power, right up to this very moment. “We need safety, we need cameras, we need all of the things we’re going to be putting in. We need the wall and we will build the wall,” he declared, to chants of “Build the wall! Build the wall!”
Trump's Fascist Poetry Reading
And there was even worse—Trump’s fascist poetry reading. Trump introduced the poem “The Snake” as a story “having to do with our borders and people coming in,” and how careful the U.S. had to be. He dedicated it to the enforcers now terrorizing millions of immigrants, thanking General Kelly (head of Homeland Security), the Border Patrol, and the ICE agents “for doing such an incredible job.”
The poem is about a “tender woman” who nourishes a sick snake back to health—only to be repaid for her generosity by a vicious bite. Trump has used the poem as a metaphor for what he insists is the need to guard against Islamic State jihadists, “terrorist” Syrian refugees, and now Mexicans—or really any immigrants or even any foreign-born people. The message: America has been kind to foreigners, but they’ve turned around and bitten the hand that’s fed them—and become criminal terrorists, drug dealers, and rapists.
“Big” doesn’t begin to describe this lie. Millions and millions have been forced to flee their countries by the bombs America has dropped, the death squads it’s organized, and exploitation it’s exported—whether in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or Central and South America. Now Trump—in the midst of the greatest global refugee crisis since World War 2, perhaps ever—is forging a fascist base willing to support all the cruelty, brutality and murder that the U.S. rulers may be compelled to further unleash. Within this country, he’s giving them a blank check to look at anyone who wasn’t born in America (and for much of his base, anyone who isn’t white) as a “snake”—a potential enemy, against which anything goes.
How is this different from the way the Nazis labeled Jewish people and others “vermin” in Hitler’s Germany, and incited mobs to attack them? And what did that lead to?
Trump’s 100th day speech underscores the reality that he’s heading up a fascist regime, which is attempting to rapidly consolidate power and carry forward its agenda. Watch the speech yourself and think about its logic and direction. And then act. This fascist regime must be driven out before it can fully consolidate. That is going to require millions of ordinary people acting in extraordinary ways, outside the framework of politics as usual.
Hundreds Protest Trump's Return to NYC as Fascist President
May 4, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Hundreds confront Trump in New York City. Photo: revcom.us
Beacon High School students. Photo: RefuseFascism.org
Construction workers protest Trump. Photo: @MaketheRoadNY
Staten Island ferry banner: #NOTRUMPNYC. Photo:@WorkingFamilies
May 4—On Donald Trump’s return to New York City for the first time since becoming president, hundreds came out to express their anger at the Trump/Pence regime’s fascist attacks on immigrants, women, health care, the LGBTQ community, and more. The main demonstration was organized across from the Intrepid—a U.S. aircraft carrier that is now a “Sea, Air & Space Museum” on Manhattan’s West Side—where Trump gave a speech. The police kept people penned in along the edge of an entire block of the street. Drivers in cars and trucks going by honked their horns in support almost constantly, for hours. One of the main organizers was Rise and Resist, NYC—last month, 26 of their members were arrested inside Trump Tower after dropping a banner to condemn the crimes being carried out against immigrants. A large group from Refuse Fascism was also there, helping to lead chants and with a huge NO! banner and dozens of NO! signs that were taken up by the crowd.
One protester, a U.S. military veteran and daughter of a Honduran immigrant, came with a group called #VetsVsHate, made up of veterans “who won’t tolerate the politics of bigotry.” Underlining the gravity of the situation, she said, “We’re in an era where popular fascism is a global epidemic.” There were close to a dozen high school students there from Beacon High School in Manhattan. One of the students said, “These are scary times. As a woman, and as a feminist, I’m afraid for our rights.” Another said, talking about the immigrants in their school, “I just want them to know that we’re here for you. We fought this long battle for civil rights. We thought we’d changed all these rights we thought we were going to have. And we’re not, we’re going back in time.... We need to show that we still care, and that our voice isn’t lost.”
Banner raised where Trump spoke at the Intrepid. Photo:Twitter/@smilyus
Jordan Edwards: 15 Years Old and Black— Murdered by Police for Riding in a Car
May 4, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Editors’ note: This article was posted before the fired cop, Roy Oliver, was charged with murder for the killing of Jordan Edwards and arrested on May 5. This is one of the very rare instances where a killer cop is actually charged with a crime—now the demand is that Oliver must be convicted and sent to jail. And this one arrest does not change the reality that this is a totally illegitimate system whose armed enforcers carry out murder after murder of Black, Brown, and other oppressed people.
Jordan Edwards had gone to a high school party with his brother at a friend’s house on a Saturday night (April 29) in Balch Springs, a small suburb outside Dallas, Texas.
No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:13
Edwards was 15 years old and Black. He was a good student and on the freshman football team, a wiry, bright-eyed kid whose smile, a friend said, “could light up a room.” It was the kind of high school night you’d be excited about—meeting classmates, hanging out, having a good time—a night that should have been one of the joys of being young and alive, with hopes and dreams.
But then, in an instant, Jordan was dead, his head blown apart by a cop’s rifle shot.
It was late, maybe 3 a.m., and someone called the cops complaining of kids drinking. Two cops arrived and went inside. Shots were reportedly fired outside. People came outside, some trying to quickly leave, including Jordan, his 16-year-old brother, and three friends. They got in their car and started to drive away. Then cop Roy Oliver, who’d also come outside, picked up a rifle and fired several shots into the car. Jordan was hit in the face, murdered right in front of his brother and his friends.
When is wanton, goddamn murder by police going to end! How many more unarmed Black youths, beautiful human beings entering the primes of their lives, are going to be gunned down by police for no other conceivable reason than they’re Black?!
Read the entire HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make RevolutionHERE
And then the cops tried to do what they always do: cover up and justify their murder. The Balch Springs Police Department quickly issued this statement: “There was an unknown altercation with the vehicle backing down the road towards the officers in an aggressive manner. An officer shot at the vehicle, striking a front seat passenger. The individual was transported to the hospital where he was pronounced deceased.” In other words, they were claiming that the cop feared for his life while doing his job, and so the killing was legitimate.
This probably would have gotten over, except that the whole incident was videotaped. The cops on the scene had blatantly lied: the car Jordan was in was going forward, AWAY from the party and away from the cops. And now that those cops have been caught in their lies, the chief of police is claiming that he was “unintentionally incorrect” in his initial statement.
The chief of police claims the actions of the officer who killed Jordan Edwards “did not meet our core values.” Didn’t meet your “core values”? Yes, they did. That’s why you jumped to broadcast their lies before the facts were in. That’s why, according to the best friend of Jordan’s father, “The police never came to the hospital.” And that’s why cops kill hundreds of people every year, all across the country—and always claim “justifiable homicide.” Their job is to protect the system and enforce the oppressive status quo. This is what their “law and order”—with all its brutality and murder—is about. And this is why time after time after time, cops who kill almost NEVER face even a slap on the wrist. Only a day after Jordan’s killing, the system let the two white cops who killed Alton B. Sterling in Baton Rouge walk free.
Roy Oliver was fired, but Jordan’s family is demanding “Justice for Jordan.” They want the killer cop arrested and charged.
Black people have been brutalized, terrorized, and murdered since this country was founded—through slavery, through Jim Crow, right up to today and the “New Jim Crow.” What kind of a system murders countless thousands of Black and Brown youths, for anything, or for nothing, decade after decade after decade? What kind of system then brings forward a fascist like Trump, who then selects as his attorney general a straight-up KKK racist like Jeff Sessions, who says the pigs have faced too much scrutiny and should now be unleashed to carry out even more police terror and murder?
What kind of a system? A completely illegitimate system that needs to be overthrown by revolution at the soonest possible moment!
Indict, Convict, Send Those Killer Cops to Jail. The Whole Damn System is Guilty as Hell!
Revolution Club Chicago: Police Manhunt—Cover for Brutalizing and Terrorizing the Community
May 4, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
According to media reports, two plainclothes police officers in an unmarked car were shot and wounded in a south side Chicago neighborhood Tuesday night, May 2. The circumstances of this shooting are unknown and nobody should believe anything that the police say about it.
This incident of police being shot does not in any way mean people should not be protesting against police terror, murder, and brutality. In fact, more protest is needed now at this time—a time when murdering pig after murdering pig is being exonerated or let off with a slap on the wrist, even when we saw them murder people on video; a time when ICE roundups are being intensified and more immigrant families are being torn apart and whole communities of people are being terrorized into retreating to the margins of society.
Most recently, it was announced that no federal charges will be filed against the pigs who murdered Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, throwing him to the ground and shooting him at close range, all captured on video. The pigs in a suburb of Dallas just shot to death a 15-year-old high school athlete in a car leaving a party. The yet-to-be-released dash cam video showed that the pig’s official justification for the shooting was so bogus that it left the police chief scrambling—firing the murdering pig. But no charges have been brought yet.
The reason this keeps happening over and over is because, “The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.” (Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24)
We know that manhunts by police become covers for wanton brutality and torture, humiliation, abuse, and worse, and any manhunts being conducted by Chicago pigs should be protested, not supported. Also the manhunt must not be allowed to be used as an excuse for roundups and deportations of immigrants swept up in it.
The Revolution Club stands with the masses of people, and if police are coming through carrying out abuse in the name of a manhunt, contact us to let us know.
Revolution Club Chicago
(312) 804-9121 Revclub.chi@gmail.com
1857 E 71st Street
(South Shore), Chicago
Hours 3pm-7pm every day except Mondays.
1st challenge met early. Generous donors have agreed to match funds raised by today up to $1500. DONATE NOW
A question: What will the communists do about free expression after the revolution?
May 8, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Editors’ note: This article has been added to since it initially appeared on May 5.
During the “battle for Berkeley,” the question has come up: what will communists do about free expression after the revolution, when you are leading the state?
The Reality of Capitalist Dictatorship
It’s important first of all to realize that “free speech” is never absolutely free. Speech and expression are constrained by the division of society into classes. Slave master and slave do not have the same rights and means to be heard, and to have their opinions debated and respected; neither do exploiter and exploited more generally, nor oppressor and oppressed. The vaunted free speech of capitalist society boils down to the domination of the discourse within the terms acceptable and favorable to the ruling class of society, spread by institutions owned and controlled by major corporations (i.e., blocs of capitalist-imperialist capital), and confined to choices which serve those classes.
To the extent there is debate, even sharp debate, this is within the terms and confines of what most serves the ruling class or, as it’s routinely put, “what’s best for America”—a formulation that conceals the fact that America is a) a big-time oppressor around the world, b) itself divided into exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, and c) that the oppressed people around the world and those within this country have very different fundamental interests than those who control the media. Such debate as there is mainly serves the rulers of the country both by enabling them to go a certain ways to resolving the differences among themselves, as well as promoting illusions among the masses and training people to see things through the eyes of the very people who dominate them.
The ideas which represent the fundamental interests of the oppressed—or ideas which are often just the new or unconventional—must at minimum struggle mightily to even get a hearing and, in the worst cases and all too often, are marginalized or outright repressed—sometimes through de facto censorship and sometimes straight-up violently, through assassination or prison. The truth—and most of all the truth about the bedrock social relations, the true history of this society, and the fact that things do not need to be this way—is routinely suppressed, distorted and lied about. Even when true facts are reported, these are almost always filtered through a lens, or framework of ideas, which takes for granted the “justice” and “right” of this system to rule.
This is a society, after all, which takes as its “bottom line” (if you’ll excuse what is a rather appropriate expression in this context) the right of some individuals to exploit the labor of many others, and thereby climb to the top in power and influence. This is enforced and reinforced by the capitalist-imperialist control of the army, prisons, courts, etc.—the instruments of dictatorship which are the essence of class rule beneath the outer appearance of “equal exchange of ideas, free speech for all.”
In short, we live in a society in which one class (the capitalist-imperialist class) dictates how society runs and to what ends, and enforces this with the armed power of the state. There are democratic rights sometimes extended within that framework, but the underlying framework – a system built on and constantly driven to extend exploitation—is not in question, and any such rights they do extend are subject to that.
(Right now, even these limited rights are under extremely serious assault by Trump and Pence, who are moving to firmly install a fascist regime, with very grave consequences if they succeed. But while there is a battle on, and correctly so, to prevent these fascists from succeeding, as communists our overall goal cannot be the restoration of a more bourgeois-democratic dictatorship, but of a revolutionary society, on the road to communism.)
On the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America
The new socialist republic will also be a state—which means that it too is fundamentally a dictatorship. But it is a dictatorship serving radically different class interests: those of the proletariat, a class that aims to overcome all exploitation and oppression, to emancipate all of humanity, and put an end to the very division of society into classes and the need for a state.
The New Socialist Republic of North America will in some critical respects be different from even the best of the previous socialist revolutions. It will be guided first of all by what Bob Avakian (BA) has brought forward around the need for a solid core, and a lot of elasticity based on that solid core. Getting to an emancipated society requires a solid core of leadership firmly rooted in what we know to be true and determined to advance the revolution up against diehard opposition and real adversity. And it requires a lot of elasticity, including in the form of making room for and fostering dissent and opposition.
This has real implications for how expression is dealt with in socialist society. In analyzing more deeply than anyone before the underpinnings of bourgeois, or capitalist, democracy and in going very deeply into the history of the two major socialist revolutions of the 20th century, Bob Avakian has brought forward a truly new and unprecedented understanding of the significance, importance and necessity of the clash of ideas in socialist society. These lessons are concentrated and concretized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which BA wrote and which was adopted by the Revolutionary Communist Party. This will be the blueprint of the new society, so let's get into it.*
First, in Article III, the Constitution... makes clear that the most fundamental right of the proletariat (the exploited within capitalist society, including those who are unemployed) and people very broadly in the new society is the right to “have the fundamentally decisive role in determining the direction of society, and to join in struggle with others throughout the world, in order to finally abolish relations of exploitation and oppression; and to bring into being, and increasingly play the determining role in regard to, government which will be an instrument toward those ends.”
Nothing like this exists in any capitalist society anywhere, nor can it—for how can those who have been exploited have the right to determine the direction of society if there are still exploiters, who by their very position in dominating the wealth can exercise far greater control? For the first time, with socialism, the institutions of the state (including the army) will represent the masses of people in eliminating and getting beyond exploitation.
In the third point of this section, beginning with point A, the principle of freedom of speech is set forth.
Freedom of speech, of assembly and association, and of dissent and protest shall not be restricted, except in cases of violation of the law and through due process of law.
Expression of opposition to this Republic and its Constitution and government—including advocacy in favor of abolishing this Republic and replacing it with another kind of society and form of government—shall not be prohibited, and on the contrary shall be permitted and protected, except as this shall involve the commission, or an active conspiracy to commit, or the direct and immediate advocacy of, violent acts, which are not in self-defense, against the government or members of the government, or others residing in this Republic, or other actions which violate the law (but, once again, expression of opposition to this Republic and its government, or mere advocacy in favor of replacing this with another form of society and government, may not be declared and treated as a violation of the law).
How will this work out in practice? After all is said and done, will it be the same thing as now, where there is a virtual monopoly by those in power on which ideas get disseminated and in what context, or will the government actually foster and encourage dissent and ferment, as promised?
The Constitution... actually goes further to make clear how this will be led.
In line with the socialist orientation and principles regarding the development of the economy—and with the orientation and principles set forth in this Constitution as a whole—the ownership and use of the major media in the New Socialist Republic in North America shall be in the hands of the government and under its ultimate direction, and specifically that of the Executive Council of the central government. At the same time, as discussed below, various media that are independent of the government shall not only be allowed but, to a significant degree, funded (and otherwise facilitated) by the central government, acting through the Executive Council and agencies and other instrumentalities it may establish for this purpose (see 4, below).
WHY the Socialist Constitution Protects and Fosters Dissent
But why should the revolution not just tolerate but value and foster dissent? This gets to the need for the truth – and the need to get to the truth, no matter where it leads or what it reveals.
What we know to be true is what corresponds to reality as it actually is, through the scientific observation of evidence, the detecting of patterns, and the testing of hypotheses and theories against that reality. If we are talking about getting to a whole new society, the solid core of what we know to be true about emancipating humanity—what humanity has learned (and will further learn) in its titanic efforts to actually do away with the long night of exploitation and oppression—has to ground what we do. Transforming society, getting rid of the cancer of exploitation and all it infects, is serious—and you wouldn’t try to cure a serious cancer just by starting from scratch, with no reference to what anyone has done or learned before, would you?
But not everything is known about what’s involved in actually getting to a fully emancipated society. We do know some principles, though, and those have to be insisted on and applied. But dissent and ferment are absolutely necessary if what is wrong, or incomplete, or just out of date in our understanding is to be broken with and if what is true can be enriched and further developed, if society's understanding is actually going to develop.
Again, why? Most fundamentally, because people who dissent, or people who bring forward something new or unconventional, may be right, or they may at least be getting at a part of the truth. Even people who outright oppose you, who say you’re totally wrongheaded and should be overthrown—they too may have identified something you missed or need to pay attention to or think more deeply about. And in any case, true ideas themselves flourish in the testing of opposed ideas, and the grasp of the truth of those who hold these ideas, or come to them through debate, can be strengthened through this clash. (Of course, that’s not the only way that knowledge grows—people can take up ideas, test them in reality itself through experiment of different kinds, and sift out the lessons from that experience. But debate can clearly be one way that knowledge of the truth grows and deepens, and in the “real world out there” experiment, investigation, and debate are often not so neatly separated.)
Such wrangling also raises the level of consciousness and active participation in the direction of socialist society among all the people—not just those who have been educated and trained to run society, but also those who have been previously locked out of working with important ideas, policies, or the scientific method. Overcoming this gap, on the road to getting to a society without such divisions, is a key task of socialist society. Increasing access to education for everybody and overcoming inequalities as we do so will be one key measure; but making it possible for, and giving leadership to, as many people to wrangle over key issues in society while that is being done is equally as important.
There’s another dimension as well. People in socialist society need to have, and need to feel that they have, room to breathe, to “think things through for themselves.” They have to know that the new state won’t, and can’t, repress them or otherwise make their lives hard merely for expressing thoughts which are unpopular, oppositional, or just simply new or unconventional; indeed, they must be given resources and room to express such thoughts. Otherwise, things will be suppressed, driven underground to fester, and the leadership won’t learn all it can from the process... and the masses will not, in their millions, learn to distinguish wrong from right on any kind of complex level.
This doesn't mean anything goes. Ideas which have been clearly identified as false—creationism, to take one example—don't need to be constantly re-heard and once again disproven. And ideas which have not only proven to be false but actively harmful—for example, the supposed genetic inferiority of different peoples or women—will be called out and actively struggled against (though even here, this will rely on masses of people doing this and not the instruments of the state).
Get into This Constitution!
We have homed in here on one dimension of the new society. But we urge people to read the Constitution... in its entirety—from the basic preamble which sets forth the founding principles of what will be the new state power brought into being by the revolution to the rules governing elections, laws, and the relations between the legislature, executive and courts... from the principles guiding every sphere of society to the ways in which people will be led to overcome the scars of the past (the various forms of oppression and the social inequalities and material disparities which will remain for some time into the revolution, even as they are being overcome)... from the principles on which the new socialist economy will be founded to the ways in which the relations between people in carrying out production, between this country and the world, and between humans and the rest of nature will be transformed... from education to the arts and sciences to national defense and the courts. There is truly nothing as visionary in the world today, or as grounded in material reality and the way the world could be transformed, as this document. A better world is not just possible—the blueprint for it has been charted out.
Confronting armed Nazis in Pikeville, Kentucky. (Photo: @IGD_News)
In the winter of 1831, the Choctaw were force-marched from Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana to reservations in Oklahoma, some bound in chains and marched double file. Thousands died along the way on this "trail of tears." 
“Get Out Trump. Get Out Enrique Peña Nieto.” 
“He is not my president.”
“LONG LIVE MEXICO.” Image of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and his wife, waving the U.S. flag.
Beacon High School students. Photo: RefuseFascism.org
