February 12, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

“You Think You’re Woke...
But You’re Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare —

This System Cannot Be Reformed,
It Must Be Overthrown!”

The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour

To you who are fed up with this society and “solutions” that are no solution...

To you who are angry and defiant and want to see an end to the white supremacy, the patriarchy and its many forms of gender oppression, the persecution of immigrants, the imperialist wars and occupations and threats, and the capitalist plunder and destruction of the environment—an end to all, or any, of the horrible forms of oppression and exploitation that define and intertwine with this capitalist-imperialist society...

To you who seek not justice for yourself or even just your own people, but the Emancipation of ALL Humanity...

To you who hate the fascism of Trump and Pence, but see through “vote for me and I’ll set you free” and any road that just makes the present horrors a little more tolerable for some within the U.S., while people around the world suffer even more...

To you who choke on “I’m woke,” “I’m good,” “No worries” when the world is being torn asunder and who have no patience for the putrid morals and relations of this culture...

To each and every person who senses that none of these horrors will be solved by this dog eat dog capitalist/imperialist system and that something radical—a real revolution—is needed... even as you have a thousand questions as to what that revolution would look like and whether it is even possible:

There Is a Way Out of This Madness!

“Let’s get down to basics:
We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.”
—Bob Avakian

We are constantly told, openly and by implication, that there is no alternative to the present order. But that is wrong!

There is a scientific approach that makes clear this madness is unnecessary and indicates the potential pathways for change. There is an actual plan for a radically different—and radically better—society, on the road to wiping out all exploitation and oppression, and emancipating humanity. There is a strategy to draw forward the millions and millions needed to make that happen. There is the leadership, in Bob Avakian (BA), the architect of the new communism and the leader of the revolution. These are great strengths on the people’s side. But, what is now missing and urgently needed is YOU—to get with, support, and become an organized part of the revolution.

There is a project to put this revolution before millions and organize thousands into it. That project is the Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour—starting out in Los Angeles in March and going around the country for the rest of the year. We’re going to boldly bring forward that science, strategy, and leadership for revolution and go right up against all the bullshit—the outmoded, petty, self-deceiving, and self-seeking bullshit that just ends up perpetuating the outrages of today.

But that’s not all. There’s no revolution without organization. We’re going to work: organizing for a revolution—enough now of everyone in “their lane,” with eyeballs glued to their screens. We’re gonna go everywhere, from the hard streets to the suburbs, from the hardscrabble rural areas to the campuses, and to wherever people are creating the new or debating the future. We’ll be giving people the concrete ways and means to support, contribute to, and join this revolution, in many different ways, big and small—with ideas and with practical involvement, with support and with questions and criticisms.

The tour will go far and wide, spreading and showing the film of the historic 2018 speech by Bob Avakian, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, that deeply answers the two questions in its title. And, the tour will get out the pamphlet, HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution, which concisely lays out the principles for how we get from the situation we are in today to actually winning an actual revolution.

Busting the People Out of Mental Shackles

We’ll call out the dead-end paths and mental shackles:

• The identity politics and all the similar rationales that end up with people looking out for themselves or their group, while the system grinds on, taking lives and crushing spirits, and dividing those who should oppose it;
• The religions that preach reconciliation and serve to keep minds away from confronting and changing reality as it really is;
• The entrepreneurialism—whether “legit,” gangsta, or NGO-style—that keeps everyone locked in the destructive, horrific capitalist present;
• The phony “socialism” that raises people’s hopes but only aims at repackaging and dividing up the spoils of U.S. domination of the world.

And we will definitely take on complicity with the Democratic Party, which poses as “the only alternative.” When in fact:

The Republican Party Is Fascist
The Democratic Party Is Also a Machine of Massive War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
This System CANNOT Be Reformed—It MUST Be Overthrown!
We Need an Actual Revolution

The tour will IMPACT everywhere it goes—opening up debate, stirring up controversy, shaking up society so that people no longer feel they have to accept the unacceptable and adjust to injustice, and instead are inspired to get organized for a revolution to change everything.

The tour will work with the Revolution Clubs where they exist and help form new ones where they don’t. The tour will connect with people protesting and resisting this system’s crimes, especially those that concentrate the deep conflicts of this system. Stepping to people with revolution straight up, and coming from that place, we’ll unite in fighting injustice and oppression, and we’ll struggle with them to see the need and possibility for revolution. This is what it means to Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution. The tour and the Revolution Clubs are where you learn about the revolution while leading—contributing to building vanguard organization necessary to lead a revolution.

The tour kicks off in March in Los Angeles and Southern California. Your participation and your support are needed to start, sustain, popularize, and defend the tour.

What You Can Do NOW

• DONATE: Without hype, absent fundamental change, without revolution, the future of humanity and the planet hangs in the balance. This tour cannot be sustained without your contribution. Become a MONTHLY SUSTAINER and make it possible to keep the tour on the move through the rest of the year. People are pouring their money into politicians of the Democratic Party—who are nothing but war criminals or war criminals-in-training, competing to be commander in chief or representatives of this bloody empire. Make a Profound Difference and DONATE to the possibility of something that could get beyond this horror and radically change the whole world.
• Learn about this tour. Go to www.revcom.us to view the speech by Bob Avakian and to learn more about the tour, the movement for revolution, Bob Avakian, and the new communism.
• Get onboard. Go to revcom.us to see ways you can spread the word, get with the tour, and get organized.

A Radically Different and Better World IS Possible!

Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour

 
Donate to
The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour:

Fundraising Kickoff Events in Four Cities—
On Fire for Revolution and on a Mission to Organize Thousands for an Actual Revolution

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

At a time of tremendous peril, revolutionaries and others gathered in public events in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area to learn about, raise money for, and help launch an audacious nationwide, year-long organizing Tour: “You Think You’re Woke... But You’re Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare--This System Cannot Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown!" The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour.

Hosted everywhere by members of the Revolution Club and anchored by an extended clip from Bob Avakian’s historic speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, these events crackled with revolutionary élan. Not just intolerance for the ways the masses of people around the world are needlessly brutalized, exploited, and kept in ignorance and misery, but also for all the backward ways of thinking these masses are currently caught up in—as well as real determination and daring to change all this.

Dramatic readings of the Tour announcement and fundraising speeches brought alive a vision of a year-long Tour starting in mid-March with a cohort of people on fire for revolution and eager to take this revolution out to the masses straight up, breaking people out of the many forms of bullshit this system has them caught up in, and organizing them into the real revolution. A beginning taste of this can be seen in the recent articles from Revolution Clubs around the country, like the call to “Stop Being Farra-CONNED!”, the challenge issued for Black History Month, and more. But as Andy Zee emphasized in New York, “This doesn’t happen without you. There’s no spectators here. Starting tonight, donating, big funds, and monthly sustainers. Without you, there’s no revolution. Not only that, there wouldn’t be a revolution worth having.” People took this to heart.

In Los Angeles, new people came off the bold efforts of the Revolution Club in the preceding weeks—out on the campuses challenging identity politics and pitiful support for the Democratic Party, among other things—and dove actively into making plans. In New York, several people had been organized in advance to donate. A musician with deep appreciation for Bob Avakian (BA) and the revolution, especially the way they challenge the dead end of reliance on the Democratic Party (even as he remains a registered Democrat), called on others to match his $2,000 donation. A longtime friend of the revolution read a statement about why she is stretching to contribute $300 a month. In the Bay Area, a group of immigrants told of hosting fundraising dinners back in Iran, inspiring people to plan monthly fundraising internationalist potlucks. In Chicago, tens of thousands had recently seen the Club stand its ground in a controversy that spread on social media, and everyone carried themselves with appropriate pride.

Together, the events raised approximately $8,000, surpassing the halfway point towards the $15,000 needed by March 15 to launch the Tour.

Not surprisingly, big challenges remain. One particular shortcoming that must be transformed: a real leap needs to be made in organizing masses of people into this revolution. Especially off the stepped-up activities of the Clubs, there need to be more new people stepping into the revolution. There is also a need to knit together those who did turn out for the kickoffs into ongoing and growing networks of financial support and revolutionary organization. At least $7,000 more is needed by March 15—another $50,000 by spring. All this means it will be critical to build on this important beginning.

Finally, in a powerful harbinger of the revolutionary spirit this Tour will unleash across the country, the gatherings culminated in defiant and celebratory performances by the Revolution Clubs of Bob Avakian’s searing revolutionary spoken word piece, “ALL PLAYED OUT.”

International Women’s Day—Let’s fight to emancipate women and create a new world!

Aurora Roja, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

English translation by revcom.us, of a statement in Spanish by the Organización Comunista Revolucionaria, México, accessed on February 28, 2019.

Patriarchy—the domination of women by men—permeates every pore of this system throughout the world. Of all the horrendous ways in which capitalism-imperialism dehumanizes and oppresses people, there is none that is more openly defended, and even justified as something “natural,” than male domination over the female half of humanity.

On December 29, 2018, Yessica Guadalupe Medrano Hernández, a 21-year-old single mother, was shot and wounded by soldiers in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. She was driving in her car, she heard shots, she stopped and got out looking for safety. The soldiers shouted at her, she turned around, and a soldier knelt down in position to shoot her. She started running and was hit with a shot in the right side. She told a journalist, “They shot me for no reason, and when I fell, they came up to kick me. Their paramedic came to help me, and another soldier shouted ‘Let the bitch die, she’s gonna get fucked!’” Yessica did not die. She was operated on to remove a piece of shrapnel from her kidney, while officers of the Military Police and the Federal Attorney General’s Office fabricated the crime of transporting gun magazines and cartridges. The military threatened her with jail if she did not sign a “pardon.” She refused and demanded that the prosecutor perform tests that would show her innocence. Five soldiers returned to threaten her, and she finally signed out of fear of being imprisoned without her wound healing. After leaving the hospital, she formally reported the soldiers who attempted to kill her.

Across Mexico, the forces of the state harass, rape, torture, and murder women. This is not an army “of the people,” as the current Mexican president López Obrador insists. It is an army for subjugating the people in general, educated in misogyny and trained to viciously practice patriarchal terror against women. Let’s remember Valentina Rosendo Cantú and Inés Fernández Ortega, Me’phaa Indian women raped in Guerrero in 2002; Ernestina Ascensio Rosario, a 73-year-old Nahua Indian, raped and murdered by soldiers in Veracruz in 2007; the women arrested in Atenco, raped by police in 2006. These are emblematic examples of thousands more. It has been documented that forces of the state systematically use sexual torture against detained women, with even more cruel outrages against lesbian, bisexual and trans women.

Why do they do this? Fundamentally because the subjugation of women is fundamental for the functioning of the current capitalist system subordinated to imperialism.

While the big Mexican and foreign capitalists dominate the economy and are enriched by the exploitation of the socialized labor of millions of people, the patriarchal family is the basic unit to try to cover, in each family isolated from the rest, the needs to survive in a competition of all against all so characteristic of this system. This family is the nucleus of the structure of male supremacy: It enslaves women with the main or total burden of caring for children and the home and for inheriting the wealth of those who have wealth and inheriting the poverty of those who do not, it reproduces relationships of inequality and exploitation, including the oppression of women, subordinated to men, justified with ideas such as “the woman, like the shotgun, in the corner and always loaded,”¹ and that the essential value of every woman is to be a mother. There will never be full emancipation of women while their primary role is to give birth and raise children.

Part of enforcing forced motherhood is the criminalization of abortion, promoted by the Catholic Church and the fundamentalist Christian churches, which are even seeking to get rid of the limited right to legal abortion in Mexico City. Although the law establishes the right to abortion in cases of rape, authorities and doctors refuse to respect it, and impose motherhood, even on girls as young as 9 or 10 years old. Hundreds of women have been imprisoned for having an abortion, sentenced to up to 30 years in prison for “homicide by reason of kinship,” even for miscarriages. In January 2019, Daphne McPherson Veloz was released from the penitentiary due to the revocation of her original sentence in San Juan del Río, Querétaro, after three years in jail for a miscarriage without knowing she was pregnant. This is a victory that must be celebrated and defended, since the prosecution seeks to challenge her acquittal. The right to abortion on demand and without apology is absolutely necessary, because women will never be free if they cannot decide whether they want to have children or not, or when and how many they want to have. The fetus is not a baby! Women are not incubators! Abortion is not murder! Forced motherhood is slavery!

The oppression of women is also a source of enormous profits for the world capitalist-imperialist system: The super-exploitation of women in sweatshops and agricultural fields, low wages for women in general, as well as the cruel enslavement of millions of women and girls in human trafficking and pornography networks, a multimillion-dollar “industry” protected by the authorities.

Misogynist (hatred of women) violence is increasing: Throughout the world, women are degraded, humiliated, beaten, raped, sold, and murdered—by their partner or former partner, by soldiers or police, or a relative, teacher, boss, or by strangers anywhere. Every 18 seconds a woman is raped in Mexico—almost 200 every hour, 4,800 every day. Rape by groups of men like “La Manada” in Spain or the “Porkys” in Veracruz, who filmed and uploaded their viciousness to the Internet, boasting of their “manhood,” illustrate male supremacy in action: The courage and power of a man are measured and proven by brutally dominating and dehumanizing women. The most extreme expression of this is the terrible increase in femicide of women and girls—like the recent case, in Chimalhuacán, State of Mexico, of Giselle Garrido Cruz, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and murdered. These crimes continue to increase despite the government’s “gender alerts,”² which have served no purpose.

This increase in vicious violence and objectification against women is in part due to machist revenge against what some men consider a challenge to their “right” to dominate women, because economic changes have led to greater female participation in the work force and other changes collide with traditional forms of patriarchy. Powerful forces in the world are battling not only to maintain patriarchy but to impose even more retrograde forms of male domination, as part of a fascist and religious fundamentalist program: Fascist forces like Trump and Pence in the United States, president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, El Yunque and other fascists in Mexico, as well as the fundamentalist Christian movements that support them.

On the other hand, in Mexico and around the world, there is a new awakening of women, defying patriarchal relations, protesting in the streets, demanding an end to so many horrors. We should not have false illusions that hard-core defenders of patriarchy will disappear: Ultimately, we will either advance towards the liberation of women, or even more horrible situations of oppression and degradation will be imposed.

A much more powerful struggle of women and men against the male supremacy and all forms of oppression of women is needed. As the initiative End Patriarchy and the War against Women says, the courage and fight against the causes and people responsible for so much violence and injustice must be unleashed, independently and against the representatives of the same system that causes all these horrors. Instead of focusing on appealing to the capitalist and patriarchal state for ineffective measures such as the “Gender Alert,” we need to rely on the masses of women and mobilize more and more people and collectives to fight with the spirit and goal of putting an end to all forms of oppression of women.

Male supremacy has nothing “natural” about it. It is an oppressive social relationship that is completely interwoven with the division between exploiters and exploited. Human beings lived for millennia without this oppression. The subjection of women arose with the division of society into classes: The division between a minority that controls, as private property, the means of production (land, animals, tools, today factories, etc.), and the majority that they exploit and oppress. The development of human society has reached a point today when it is possible and necessary to overcome all that. It is through a revolution that overthrows this system and eliminates all relations of exploitation and oppression, that it will be possible to put an end to the fundamental division in which half of humanity is subjugated and dominated by the other half.

This is the revolution guided by the new communism, a revolution aimed at overthrowing capitalism-imperialism throughout the world to achieve the complete emancipation of women and of all humanity. As La revolución liberadora, Orientación estratégica y programa básico [The Liberatory Revolution, Strategic Orientation and Basic Program] points out, with the triumph of this revolution in Mexico, immediately patriarchy will begin to be dismantled and leaps will be made in the liberation of women, with a program that includes: * Eliminate immediately sexual slavery and the pornography “industry.” * Establish the right to safe and free abortion at the free and exclusive will of women. * Unleash the revolutionary struggle of women as a powerful force for the transformation of the entire society. * Combat all forms of discrimination and sexual harassment until eliminated, criticize the ideology of machismo and undertake the transformation of the traditional patriarchal family. * Full respect for sexual and gender diversity. * Establish relationships of equality and mutual respect in the family, mobilizing women in collective action to put an end to domestic violence and breaking with stereotypical and oppressive gender concepts. * Begin to collectivize what now is housework and raising children, with childcare centers, community kitchens, etc., with the participation of men and women in these tasks. * A new sexual culture, free of antiquated and oppressive concepts for women, of guilt, sin or the “sacred character” of virginity, based on relationships of love, affection, equality, and mutual respect.

The Revolutionary Communist Organization is forging the necessary leading force and movement to make this revolution and we call on all those who no longer tolerate the world as it is to get into this great struggle.

Let’s fight from here forward to end patriarchy and emancipate women!

Aurora Roja, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico

aurora-roja.blogspot.com

1. This means something along the lines of “women should be barefoot and pregnant”—in other words, a patriarchal expression that women’s “role” is to stay at home, bear children, and cook and clean the house. [back]

2. The phrase “gender alerts” refers to federal, state and local government measures to supposedly combat violence against women, instituted starting some years ago under pressure from civil organizations and groups due to high rates of femicides. As of December 5, 2018, 18 of the 31 states in Mexico have such measures on the books, as well as many dozens of municipalities and other districts. [back]

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Support the Revolt of Iranian Women against Forced Hijab!

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Below is a CALL issued by an underground women’s collective in Iran. Their Call is supported by radical workers, teachers, students, artists, writers, and other justice seeking groups. This Call is issued on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Iranian women’s revolt against Ayatollah Khomeini’s Decree on compulsory Hijab. The Call also stands in solidarity with the fight against the rise of fascism and racism in North America, Europe and other parts of the world.

March 8, 2019 marks 40 years since the uprising of women against the Islamic Republic “Hijab Decree.” In this year, we are also marking the first anniversary of uprising of dispossessed masses and daring revolt of women against the hijab, popularly known as the “Women of Revolution Street.” Today we are in the midst of growing strikes and protests by workers, farmers, students, teachers, nurses, pensioners, and other groups.

Therefore, we call on all of you to support the struggle of women against the forced hijab.

We consider the struggle against the forced hijab as a global struggle against all forms of patriarchal oppression and degradation of women by Islamic fundamentalist states and groups in the Middle East and North Africa and all over the world. This is a global struggle against male supremacy, racism and sexism by all of the capitalist imperialist states, fundamentalism, Christian fascism, and right wing political forces throughout the world.

We, women and men, aim to unite the struggle against forced hijab with:

• the struggle for political rights, such as freedom of expression and association; civil liberties; freedom of sexuality and the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
• the struggle against the torture and imprisonment of political, labour, environmentalist, and social activists; the struggle for freedom of all political prisoners and those who have been jailed for their beliefs.
• the struggle against all wars waged by imperialist and reactionary armies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan, as well as all sectarian wars in this region.
• the fight for the right of the masses to have access to science and a scientific understanding of the human and natural world we all inhabit; the fight against religious superstition; and the struggle for the separation of state and religion.
• the struggle against poverty, unemployment, dispossession and displacement of people, economic corruption, child labour, exploitation and plundering of the lives of workers, teachers, and peasants; and the fight for equality, safety, and economic and social security for all people.
• the struggle against all kinds of national, cultural, linguistic and religious discrimination against Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Turkmens, Baloch people in Iran, as well as the struggle against the persecution of Dervish and Baha’i followers; and the struggle for equality and freedom of all nations and cultures in Iran and in the Middle East and North Africa.
• the struggle against environmental destruction, plundering of nature by capitalist relations of production which itself gives rise to corruption; and fight for the right of people to clean air, revival of marshlands, safeguarding rivers, forests and lakes for the future generations on the planet earth.

Thus, Beware, Beware—We ARE TOGETHER!

The emancipation of women concerns the whole humanity. A society in which half of its people are second class citizens is a suffocating society. Thousands of years ago, women’s oppression emerged with the rise of private property and exploitation. Today, patriarchal and male supremacist relations have their roots in the functioning of capitalist relations of production, which also produces all of the other problems we face, including imperialist wars, poverty, unemployment, and the destruction of environment, etc. Therefore:

• We want a world without exploitation, discrimination, oppression and suppression, war, and the destruction of the environment.
• We want a society that considers—not only every woman—but every human being regardless of their gender, race, identity, nationality, and beliefs as a full human being. In our imagined and desired society everybody would have equal opportunities to fulfil their potentials and dreams—a society within which the blossoming of each is required for the blossoming of all.

We call upon all women and men involved in different social movements to join and defend our struggle for an unconditional abolition of mandatory Hijab, and Sharia laws as well as eradicating all kinds of women’s oppression. Without women’s emancipation, none of us is free.

Email: eightmarch@mail.com
https://nashriyeosyan.wordpress.com/
8mars2019@gmail.com

اسامی امضاکنندگان /Supporters

Support the Revolt of Iranian Women against Forced Hijab!

اسامی امضاکنندگان /Supporters

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

توجه:
۱. این لیست قسمی و در حال تکامل است.
۲. به علت مسائل امنیتی، ما قادر نیستیم اسامی افراد را (به درستی بنا به خواست خودشان) منتشر کنیم. در نتیجه برخی به شکل «جمعی از ...» آورده شده است.

جمعی از دانشجویان مبارز دانشگاه های ایران
جمعی از زنان مبارز علیه حجاب اجباری در تهران
جمعی از کارگران کرمانشاه
جمعی از دانشجویان هنر
جمعی از حامیان «دختران خیابان انقلاب» در چندین شهر ایران
جمعی از جوانان خیزش دی ماه: علیه دین و حجاب
جمعی از زنان و مردان فعال در خیزش ۵ روزه سال ۱۳۵۷ علیه فرمان حجاب
جمعی از فعالین کودکان کار
جمعی از زنان فارغ التحصیل دانشکده معماری دانشگاه بین المللی قزوین
تارا بهروزیان (فعال چپ جنبش زنان)
ماکان (نویسنده)
فواد (کارگر فولاد)
لیلی بابائی- فعال زنان، کمونیست
شبیر صابری
سما شاملو
مهرداد فرهاد
نیلوفر
ستاره كيانوش
سيامك صبورى
Elnaz Tabrizi
خسرو شاهد
Ahmadi oskui
رزیتا رهنمایی(فعال سوسیالیست_
محمد حسامی
یاسمن دروگر
بهار مظفرى
ساغر افخم
نسیم بهمنیان
هیلدا
saeed salehinia
مجید آزادیخواه
Maryam
فرید
Sahar
Shamim saber
Mohmmad Allabakhshi
رعنا
ساسان بهرامی
پگاه فرهنگی
اصفهان
مهتاب
وریا مدرسی
سنور ميركي كردستان
Shere
Asemoon
Samira
Sadri
اسماعیل محمودی
كاني احمدي
Esko Rautiola
T. Matikainen
Minna Karvonen
Mehregan
Magnus Hellsten
Sasan
سنور میرکی
Samira
محمد
Shahin amiri
Macus Kane
Zahra
sarv
Sahar siavashi
Saeed
سودابه معصومی
Babak
فتحی
Sarah Stewart
علی نیری
Negin
مريم مهرباني
Maryam Mehrabani
Azar Alvandyfar
مژگان
کاس آقا
Eshagh (Communist)
Nastaran
امیر خراسانی
اسحاق فرهمند
Shirin Hosseinpour
Rea Cris
Artin
شلير شبلى
Frozen
Shoresh
سالومه
حبیب
زهرا ط.س
الناز
گيل آوايى
حميد صدر
استى پيروتى
moboina
Maryam Zamani
Sedi
Basile Chaix
Break the chain
Arman mohammadi
محمد قامشلو
Erfan
حمید صدر
گیل آوایی
استی پیروتی
اکبر غیاثی
سوسن گل محمدی
سیروس ماهان
ناهید بازوفتی
حسبن مقدسی
سحر زمانی
هانا تذروي
آيدا عطار
Lena W
Silvia
Lotta Fors
Jose Maiz
Elli-Maija Katila
شراره رضایی
شهلا رضایی
مریم رمضانی
Atiyeh
ميترا محمودي و راديو اواي زن از استراليا
نامیرا نوری

Andrea Hübner
moniza sar
منصوره بهکیش
کریم عقیقی
ناصر- زندانی سیاسی سابق از تورنتو
ترلان عقیقی
Medya
ن. مظفری
Maya Lama
Jori Kallio
سامان بهزادی زندانی سابق
مسعود ش ا المان
زهرا
h
Hedye
Fariba fem.
Reija
يك فعال مدني
Matti Mäkelä
الی،از اصفهان
سحر شهیار

آناهیتا رحمانی
Hoory nouroozi
مهدیس صادقی پویا
مرجان
Zhila Davarpanah
مژگان حاجی‌زادگان
Sami
Faranak
Reema baba
مرضیه
Sepide
آناهيتا رحمانى (زندانى سياسى دهه شصت و از نويسندگان كتاب و ما إنكار خداى شان بوديم)
ابراهیم علاسوندی
عیدی نعمتی شاعر
بیژن جلالی فعال سوسیالیست
Tina
فاطمه سلامی
Matti Mäkelä Uskonnon harjoittamisen on oltava ehdottoman vapaehtoista. Samoin kuin uskontoon liittyvien tapojen ja pukeutumisen noudattaminen
لاله عنبری
Ebrahim Arzani
Hanna-Maija Linna-Sjövall
صنم ص
Elo Alizadeh
فرشته ایزدی
سارا سنندج
Farzin iranfar

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

از عصیان زنان علیه حجاب اجباری دفاع می کنیم!

چهل سال پس از خروش زنان در ۸ مارس ۱۳۵۷ علیه فرمان حجاب اجباری و در سالگرد خیزش دی ماه ۹۶ زحمتکشان و فرودستان و سالگرد جنبش سرفراز زنان خیابان انقلاب، در زمانۀ اعتلای مبارزات و اعتصابات و تظاهرات کارگران، معلمان، کشاورزان، دانشجویان، بازنشستگان و دیگر قشرهای اجتماعی و صنفی، خواهان دفاع از مبارزات زنان ایران علیه حجاب اجباری هستیم.
مبارزه با حجاب اجباری در ایران را، در پیوند با مبارزه علیه هر شکلی از تحقیر و ستم بر زنان و پدرسالاری در سراسر جهان، علیه دولتها و باندهای بنیادگرای اسلامی در خاورمیانه و شمال آفریقا، علیه مردسالاری و سکسیسم دولتهای سرمایه داری و فاشیستهای مسیحی و دست راستی در آمریکا، روسیه، اتحادیه اروپا و شرق دور پیش خواهیم برد.

ما زنان و مردان پشتیبانِ جنبش علیه حجاب اجباری و حامی برابری زن و مرد:
۱. مبارزه با حجاب اجباری را به مبارزه با تفتیش عقاید، تحمیل باور و اندیشه، تحمیل دین و سبک زندگی اجتماعی مردم و در دفاع از آزادی های فکری، اجتماعی و تنوع سلایق و گرایشات جنسی و حقوق ال.جی.بی.تی.کیوها پیوند می زنیم.
۲. مبارزه با حجاب اجباری را به مبارزه با شکنجه و زندان، سرکوب و دستگیری فعالین سیاسی و اجتماعی و صنفی، و در دفاع از آزادی های سیاسی و آزادی همۀ زندانیان سیاسی و عقیدتی پیوند می زنیم.
۳. مبارزه با حجاب اجباری را به مبارزه با جنگهای ویرانگر ارتشهای امپریالیستی و ارتجاعی منطقه در خاورمیانه و نزاعها و اختلافات دینی و فرقه ای از سوریه و عراق تا یمن و افغانستان و برای دستیابی همۀ مردم به علم و آگاهی در برابر جهل و خرافۀ دینی و تاریک اندیشی و جدایی دین از دولت، پیوند می زنیم.
۴. مبارزه با حجاب اجباری را به مبارزه با بیکاری، فقر و محرومیت، دزدی و فساد اقتصادی، استثمار و به غارت بردن دسترنج کارگران، معلمان، کشاورزان و کودکانِ کار و در دفاع از رفاه، برابری و امنیت اقتصادی و اجتماعی همه مردم پیوند می زنیم.
۵. مبارزه با حجاب اجباری را به مبارزه با هرشکل تبعیض ملی، فرهنگی و دینی علیه کردها، عربها، ترکها، افغانستانی ها، ترکمنها، بلوچها، دراویش، بهاییان و غیره و در دفاع از برابری و آزادی همه ملل و فرهنگهای ساکن ایران و منطقه پیوند می زنیم.
۶. مبارزه با حجاب اجباری را به مبارزه با نابودی محیط زیست و به تاراج بردن طبیعت توسط روابط تولیدی سرمایه داری که مولدِ رانت خواری و فساد است و در دفاع از هوای پاک و بازسازی و احیای تالابها، رودخانه ها، دریاچه ها، کوه ها و جنگلها برای نسلهای آتی مردم جهان پیوند می زنیم.
پس «بترسید بترسید – ما همه با هم هستیم»!
آزادی زن، مسالۀ کلِ جامعۀ بشری است. جامعه ای که نیمی از جمعیت آن شهروند درجه دوم به حساب می آید، جامعه ای عقب مانده و خفقان آور است. هزاران سال پیش، فرودستی اجتماعی زن همراه با ظهور مالکیت خصوصی و استثمار به جود آمد. امروز، روابط مردسالارانه و پدرسالارانه، و هر معضل اجتماعی دیگر مانند جنگ های امپریالیستی و نابودی محیط زیست جملگی ریشه در عملکرد روابط تولیدی سرمایه داری دارند. پس، ما خواهان جهانی بدون استثمار و بهره کشی، بدون تبعیض و ستم و سرکوب، بدون جنگ و نابودی محیط زیست هستیم. جامعه ای که نه فقط هر زن بلکه هر انسانی فارغ از جنسیت، هویت و ملیت، باور و عقیده، یک انسان کامل محسوب شده و در آن، امکانات همسان برای کل بشریت در مسیر یک زندگی انسانی و بالفعل کردن توانایی ها، خلاقیتها و امیدهایش فراهم است. جامعه ای که شکوفایی هر انسان، شرط شکوفایی همگان است.

نه به حجاب اجباری! زنده باد آزادی و برابری!
ما زنان آزاده – از حجاب اجباری – بیزاریم بیزاریم!
عصیان، خیابان، جای زنان همینجا است!
فقر، حجاب، استثمار – آماج یک پیکارند!
زن، کارگر، دانشجو – اتحاد اتحاد!

امضاکنندگان

شهرزاد مجاب
مریم جزایری
شکیب مصدق، خواننده انترناسیونالیست افغانستانی، اهدا کنندۀ کلیپ «ما از عصیان زنان علیه حجاب اجباری حمایت می کنیم»
مریم زارعی، سازنده فیلم «زاده شده در اوین»، اکران شده در فستیوال برلیناله
اشرف غیاثی، کتاب «و ما انکار خدایشان بودیم»

Email : eightmarch@mail.com
https://nashriyeosyan.wordpress.com/
8mars2019@gmail.com

سامی امضاکنندگان /Supporters

March 8, 2019, International Women's Day

International Women’s Day Events

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Editors note: We encourage people to pull together showings of excerpts from the film of Bob Avakian’s talk WHY WE NEED AN ACTUAL REVOLUTION AND HOW WE CAN REALLY MAKE REVOLUTION and discussion of quotes from BAsics relevant to International Women's Day for the coming weekend—and send us the info so it can be posted on this page (e-mail to revolution.reports@yahoo.com).

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Intersectionality: Feel-good Make-believe in the “Woke” Spaces of Empire

by Nayi Duniya

March 2, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Welcome to the land of intersectionality—where a seemingly radical and all-encompassing framework can comprehend and traverse multiple oppressions faced by billions on this planet without the “messiness” of overthrowing the system that generates and enforces these oppressions; where truth is determined and wrong is righted by anointing the most oppressed as authority and leadership in struggles for reform; where the most fundamental and deep-seated social divisions and lopsided gulfs of the world such as between rich and poor nations are effectively ignored and where identified “intersections” and “direct experience” shared across “lanes” are sufficient to change the world.

This is feel-good make-believe “woke” world. In the real world of horrendous—and needless—suffering, it is a cruel joke inflicted upon the billions of humanity. The world is a horror for the vast majority—oppression and exploitation of whole peoples, genocidal wars and violence in the intimate sphere, millions driven off homes by conflict and global warming. This world is shaped and stamped by a system: the system of capitalism-imperialism.

As Bob Avakian says:

Let’s get down to basics: We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.

From BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian (BA), 3:1

Intersectionality is a framework for ranking and adjudicating different forms of oppression which can only leave the world as it is, with people fighting each other over turf and privilege. With its “standpoint epistemology,” it disallows the necessary and possible analysis of underlying driving dynamics that are the systemic causes of this horrific oppression—felt and lived by billions! There is NOTHING “radical” about intersectionality, either on the problem (the root causes of the oppression) or the solution (what is to be done to fundamentally uproot and get beyond it). To do that takes science, looking beyond the surface at underlying mainsprings and drivers, how they historically evolved, function, and continue to change.

Would one diagnose and cure any serious disease like cancer or Ebola just on the shared “intersectional” lived experiences of each patient, confining oneself to their symptoms and suffering, instead of the application of science—bringing to bear underlying causes like gene mutations or germs, corresponding treatments, and in this context, learn from and work with patients?

Objective social reality actually exists and is not just an adjudicated compilation of narratives, nor is it determined by what people think even while that’s a part of it. Societies, like all natural phenomena, come into being, change, and go out of existence—and science can be applied to society, as it can to nature, to grasp the underlying and driving dynamics and the multiple pathways of development within those dynamics.

These are the questions that must be confronted and dug into: What are the real and dynamic links between capitalist production relations and the deep-rooted forms of social oppression that are embedded in this society, such as the oppression of Black people, of women, of LGBTQ people, of immigrants? Can we do away with one without the other? Will it take a revolution, overthrowing this whole system, or can we do something less? How can an actual revolution be made in a country like the U.S.? What sort of society needs to and can replace this? Is it possible, and how do we fundamentally get to a world beyond all this oppression, exploitation, and antagonistic social division, to the emancipation of all of humanity? What does that look like, as part of a worldwide process?

There are approaches and answers to ALL these questions, concentrated in the breakthroughs of Bob Avakian, BA. The scientific discovery made by Marx of how societies develop and the possibility of a future without class divisions and all forms of oppression, and the further developments of that understanding through a whole first wave of communist revolutions, were world changing advances for humanity. But there were significant aspects in theory and practice that ran counter to communism’s fundamentally scientific and emancipatory character and goals. BA has resolved this and has forged a whole new framework for emancipating all of humanity, the new communism. So, yes, there is a radical and scientific framework that can not only comprehend the multiple oppressions faced by billions on this planet, but chart the way beyond it!

“Standpoint epistemology” or applying “intersectional analysis” do not even broach these critical questions—and are obstacles in this much-needed process. Of course, these forms of oppression “intersect,” for they occur in the context of a worldwide system of capitalism-imperialism, but proceeding from the “standpoint” or “narratives” of even the most oppressed does not get to the underlying system, and how all these oppressive social relations are interwoven in the history of this society and the nature of this system. Class, approached as an “intersectional identity,” is not a substitute for or the essence of, or even begins to comprehend, capitalism-imperialism as a global system of production relations which puts its stamp on the social relations and ideas of the time.

Without science and a scientific approach to get at the root causes, what is needed to uproot this and set up a radically different system and society, ALL resistance and struggles are channeled back into the very same system that is the source of this oppression in the first place. Without this, even the sincerest and best of intent, insight, analysis, and struggle is constrained or straitjacketed by the fundamental lack of seeing beyond the capitalist mode of production, the permanence of this system. The narratives and lived experiences of the oppressed, silenced for too long, have a critical role—but in this context, to make revolution and to get beyond it all, for the emancipation of all of humanity, not to “get mine” or get atop a “woke” world!

Tellingly, American privilege is deafeningly absent in “woke” world’s intersectional matrix of oppression, unmentioned in “safe spaces,” even while the U.S. is atop this parasitic food chain of capitalism-imperialism! Focused on “me” and “my” oppression, what about the 7 billion people—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Central and South America, or Bangladesh; the billions in the sweatshops, the mines, the farms providing your clothes, technology and food? And the list goes on and on...

In “woke” spaces of America, standpoint is mere guideposts to adjudicate scraps of spoils, spoils of empire, not a framework for the emancipation of all of humanity. For those trying to apply intersectionality across borders without seeking to uproot the divide between the imperialist countries and the Third World, and the role of the U.S. atop this, this is at best a pipe dream, at worst an apologia for imperialism, concentrating the essence: being “woke” without fundamentally changing a goddamn thing!

A CHALLENGE AND AN INVITATION

We do not need any more people getting played—squandering their desire for real change into following hustlers or schoolyard bully types who rationalize turning oppressed “identities” into political capital, at times with seemingly radical veneer like “abolitionism” on harmful illusions and meaningless reforms, other times pitching for candidates of the ruling-class, war-criminal Democratic Party. We do not need the “right to speak” and “leadership” legitimated by identity and narrative, but judged by the content of what is being said, and where it is being led.

WHAT IS URGENTLY NEEDED: radically and fundamentally changing the world and all its oppressive social relations. That requires serious dialogue and debate on reform vs. revolution: what is the source of these horrors and what is the solution, what will emancipate all of humanity and what will be mere rearrangements within the same system!

Every person of conscience should engage this Call:

“You Think You’re Woke... But You’re Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare—This System Cannot Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown!”

The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour

#BEB

Updated March 16, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

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Free Yourself From the GTF:
10 Facts on Korea, Venezuela, and the “Good Guys”

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

This past week has seen continued turmoil in the international situation. The summit meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un collapsed, heightening the conflicts in an explosive region. The sharp conflict over trade and all-round cutthroat competition between the U.S. and China simmered. And the U.S. continued to threaten the country of Venezuela with a possible military invasion, claiming that the regime is illegitimate and maniacally “starving its own people.”

All this is very dangerous. But what is the framework that you’re being given by the politicians, pundits, and the education system to understand all this—and everything else of any significance that happens in the world? It’s the GTF—and listen here as Bob Avakian breaks down just what that is.

Now, check out the facts that we have marshaled below that blow apart this bullshit, and dig into the articles we’ve run that take it deeper.

North Korea:

1. Over three million Korean people were killed during the 1950-1953 U.S.-led war on Korea.

2. U.S. warplanes dropped more bombs and napalm during the Korean War than they had during the entire Pacific campaign of World War 2, and also used chemical and biological weapons.

3. More than 99 percent of all buildings in North Korea over one-story high were destroyed by U.S. bombing during the Korean War, and the bombing killed 30 percent of North Korea’s population. In 1950 that would have been proportional to 45 million Americans being killed.

4. The U.S. stationed nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s, officially remains at war with North Korea today, regularly conducts provocative military exercises near its border, and has 28,000 American troops stationed on the border—and yet denounces North Korea as being “dangerous” and “aggressive.”

5. The U.S. and UN have imposed harsh and far-reaching economic sanctions on North Korea, affecting the masses of people in that country. According to the New York Times (March 2, 2019), the most recent round of sanctions since March 2016 have expanded beyond weapons and nuclear-related equipment to “entire export sectors, including minerals, metals, coal, agriculture and seafood” as well as energy sales. “Hard-line administration officials” want these sanctions to continue, the Times noted, because of “the far-reaching nature of the sanctions—and the suffering they were causing.”

For more, see “Take the Korea Pop Quiz: What do you REALLY know about Korea?” and “American Crime: Case #93: U.S. Invasion of Korea—1950.”

Venezuela:

6. The U.S. has imposed crippling economic sanctions against Venezuela and seized billions of dollars worth of Venezuelan funds, which has prevented its government from buying much-needed food and medicine and deliberately caused hunger and shortened life spans.

7. Former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield said “perhaps the best solution would be to accelerate the collapse” of Venezuela, acknowledging that this would bring on “fairly severe punishment” for Venezuelans “who are already having great difficulty finding enough to eat, getting themselves cured when they get sick, or finding clothes to put on their children....” But, Brownfield said, “the desired outcome [of installing a pro-U.S. regime] justifies this fairly severe punishment.”

8. U.S. officials and top politicians have openly called for the Venezuelan military to revolt against the government of Nicolás Maduro.

9. After directly consulting with the Trump/Pence regime, Juan Guaidó, head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, declared on January 23 that Maduro was illegitimate and that he was the legitimate interim president. The U.S. and dozens of its allies then immediately recognized Guaidó as the president and started giving him millions in aid.

10. What the U.S. is doing in Venezuela now is part of a history of such crimes in Latin America, under both Democrats and Republicans—from the 1973 CIA coup in Chile to the backing of death squads and massacres of indigenous people in El Salvador and the coup in Honduras engineered by Obama and Clinton, to literally hundreds and hundreds of other invasions, embargoes, coups, manipulations, and other acts of aggression.

For more, see “Venezuela: Escalated War Threats and U.S. ‘Aid’ as Weapon: U.S. Media and Democrats Obediently Line Up with Fascist Trump/Pence Regime on Regime Change in Venezuela”; American Crime series installments on the CIA coup in Chile, U.S. backing of death squads in El Salvador, and the coup in Honduras.

From the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

To Do This, We Need To Know:

Why we need an actual revolution.
What we need to do now.
How we could defeat them.

ABOUT THE BOOK, ORDER HERE

See excerpts HERE

Pre-publication PDF of this major work—including the appendices—available HERE

Insight Press has announced that in addition to the print book, THE NEW COMMUNISM is now available as an eBook at Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble and other retail and library websites.

Points of Attention for the Revolution

The Revolution Club upholds, lives by and fights for the following principles:

1 We base ourselves on and strive to represent the highest interests of humanity: revolution and communism. We do not tolerate using the revolution for personal gain.

2 We fight for a world where ALL the chains are broken. Women, men, and differently gendered people are equals and comrades. We do not tolerate physically or verbally abusing women or treating them as sexual objects, nor do we tolerate insults or “jokes” about people’s gender or sexual orientation.

3 We fight for a world without borders, and for equality among different peoples, cultures and languages. We do not tolerate insults, “jokes” or derogatory names about a person’s race, nationality, or language.

4 We stand with the most oppressed and never lose sight of their potential to emancipate humanity—nor of our responsibility to lead them to do that. We work to win people of all backgrounds to take part in the revolution, and do not tolerate revenge among the people.

5 We search for and fight for the truth no matter how unpopular, even as we listen to and learn from the observations, insights and criticisms of others.

6 We are going for an actual overthrow of this system and a whole better way beyond the destructive, vicious conflicts of today between the people. Because we are serious, at this stage we do not initiate violence and we oppose all violence against the people and among the people.

Now is the time to spread these messages to all of society

"HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution" is a companion to the Message from the Central Committee of the RCP, USA posted on www.revcom.us on May 16, 2016.  Get "HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution,” together with “Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution,” out everywhere.  Now is the time to spread the word to all of society.

Download "HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution" HERE (36”x24” PDF): ENGLISH  | ESPAÑOL.  Download “Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution” HERE (17"x 22" PDF): ENGLISH | ESPAÑOL.  Our suggestion is that they be printed on white bond paper and posted together in the appropriate ways all over the place. Here’s a rough picture of what this could look like.

“HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution” now in booklet form!

Printing Instructions:
The PDF of a booklet that includes “HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution,” “Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution” and the “Points of Attention for the Revolution”is now available. This booklet is 16 pages long. The size of the laid-out pages is 5 1/2" x 8 1/2". It can also be printed 6" x 9". There are two layouts here. 1) One is a single PDF with 16 consecutive, individual pages. 2) The second is a printer's spread; that is, the first spread is page 16 and page 1, the second is page 2 and page 15, etc., so that when it prints and is folded, the pages will be in order. Printers can tell you which layout they need. Readers should make plans for printing this 5 1/2" x 8.5" booklet, raising money, and getting it out in the tens of thousands everywhere as soon as possible.

ENGLISH:
Download 5.5x8.5 PDF, single pages
Download 5.5x8.5 PDF, printer spread

SPANISH:
Download 5.5x8.5 PDF, single pages
Download 5.5x8.5 PDF, printer spread

Vallejo Police Firing Squad That Executed Willie McCoy Is Back on the Job
And What IS Their Job?!

From the Revolution Club, SF Bay Area

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On February 28, civil rights attorney John Burris called a press conference in Vallejo, California—the Bay Area city with the highest per capita rate of murder by police—with victims of police brutality and family members of people whose lives were stolen by the Vallejo Police Department (VPD). Dozens of people showed up with signs and pictures of their loved ones who were killed by the police. Burris announced a claim against the City of Vallejo which said, in part: “The six person firing squad shot Mr. McCoy approximately 25 times. The officers’ bullets struck Mr. McCoy in the head, ear, neck, chest, arms, shoulders, hands, and back. The entire operation was bungled from start to finish....”¹

Vicious. Cold-blooded. But bungled? No. It was the police doing their job. Hunting down and terrorizing Black and Brown youth. Yes, from a human perspective, of how to deal with a young man who is passed out in his car in the Taco Bell drive-through, there is absolutely NO reason Willie McCoy should be dead. But from a pig perspective—from the perspective of the system that these pigs enforce, a system that has no jobs and no future for people like Willie and views them as just a bug to be squashed, as someone put it at the press conference—it was business as usual: a two-week paid vacation for the six cops, and then cleared to go back to work!

One of the six pigs, Ryan McMahon, also murdered unarmed 32-year-old Ronnell Foster just last year, stopping him supposedly for “riding a bicycle in an unsafe manner,” tasing him, beating him, and then shooting him in the back when he tried to get away. At the press conference, Burris put it like this:

Something is rotten within the Vallejo Police Department. There is a sense that within this department itself, there is a lack of appreciation, a lack of concern, a lack of caring, for life, or the physical well being of the African-American community. There are many cases where people have been stopped wrongfully, they’ve been arrested wrongfully, they’ve been stopped while taking videos, all of which is wrong. The department acts as if it’s an occupying force, a military occupying force in this community, and we’re not going to stand for it anymore.

John Burris’ office itself has been involved in over 14 cases against the VPD in the last seven years, and said he’s aware of at least 30 more cases of VPD brutality in recent years. Some of the incidents have been caught on video, like the VPD beating of unarmed 23-year-old Dejuan Hall in 2017. And the bloody beating of a Latino man last year. And the viral video that Adrian Burrell took in January of Vallejo pig David McLaughlin pulling a gun on his cousin and then brutalizing him for filming it from his own front porch! Same pig McLaughlin who, in 2017, chased Jeffrey Barboa into Richmond, rammed his car and shot him 41 times. And we can go on and on. In 2012, VPD pig Sean Kenney killed three people in five months, and was given a promotion. In August 2015, Jimmy Brooks’ mother called police saying that her son was suicidal. Police beat him, breaking both his legs and his foot. In April 2016, Nickolas Pitts was at his apartment taking out the trash when the VPD pulled up and held him at gunpoint before beating and arresting him. In January 2017, two Vallejo pigs tased Joe Ledesma’s dog in his home, and when Joe protested they tased him and then beat him, breaking both his arms. In the same month, three VPD pigs pulled Jason Anderson over while at work delivering car parts, tased him multiple times, beat and kicked him. Also in January 2017, Vallejo police showed up at a party where a fight was happening and they shot 21-year-old Angel Ramos to death in his own home. Police claimed he had a knife and was stabbing someone, but the “stabbing victim” didn’t have any knife wounds and said that they were just fist-fighting and there was no knife. The DA refused to press charges and called it a “justifiable homicide”!

All the sadness and anger about this poured out at the press conference when people spoke out, with many demanding justice not only for their loved ones, but for all victims of police terror. It was striking that, in this small city of 118,000, a number of people were connected to more than one victim of police murder, and many had themselves been brutalized by the police.

Here's one of Willie's sisters at an emotional rally outside Vallejo city hall yesterday: "Y'all didn't give him a chance." pic.twitter.com/0HMWuuvsqX

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) March 1, 2019

Alicia Saddler, sister of Angel Ramos, 21-year-old killed by Vallejo PD, talking about the bond between her and other grieving families: "I gained this family because they share the pain that my family does. They have a loved one who was murdered by Vallejo police." pic.twitter.com/lxJLvqcV4t

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) March 1, 2019

Here's the family of Ronell Foster, unarmed man killed last year by one of the officers who shot Willie McCoy. They say multiple relatives suffered illnesses in the wake of the grief and trauma of Ronell's death: "They're killing whole families." pic.twitter.com/iOvNTi4Jav

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) March 1, 2019

After the press conference, Burris’ legal team led a short but angry march, with people chanting “No Justice, No Peace!” and “Six cops 26 shots!”

In Vallejo w/ families whose loves ones were stolen by VPD. 1 of the 6 pigs that executed #WillieMcCoy while he was SLEEPING also murdered #RonnellFoster while he was RUNNING AWAY. Now all 6 are back on the job. And what IS their job?! Hunting & terrorizing Black & Brown youth! pic.twitter.com/W9CHz58xNV

— Revolution Club Bay Area (@RevClub_bay) March 1, 2019

When the march returned to the plaza in front of City Hall, several young women got in front of media cameras demanding to be heard. “This was a lynching.” “This has got to stop.” A member of the Revolution Club started agitating to the crowd about how America was NEVER great and why this system can’t be reformed, but must be overthrown. He read Bob Avakian’s quote from BAsics about how “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.” And he challenged people that to really make this stop we need an actual revolution. We got out the statement from the Revolution Club throughout the crowd.

Watch this video from a young woman in Vallejo and then ask yourself HOW LONG MUST THIS GO ON? How many more will they murder before we wake up and get organized for a real revolution?

RIP WILLIE McCOY x BLACK LIVES MATTER #fuckVPD 🗣 #BLACKLIVESMATTER 🗣 #RIPWILLIE 🗣 pic.twitter.com/FUCxvvQlxq

— Trippy꓄ꍏ꒒ꀤꀤ🦂 (@TrippyTalii) March 1, 2019

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

1. Willie McCoy, a 20-year-old Black man, was murdered by police on February 9 as he was sleeping or passed out in his car.  [back]

Willie McCoy

This Week’s News from the Conspiracy to Let Killer Cops Off

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The system we live under is enforced and held in place by a brutal capitalist dictatorship—a violent apparatus of repression and suppression. A key pillar of this system is keeping oppressed people—Black, Latino, and Native American people in particular—held down through arbitrary and bloodthirsty police murder and terror. And this system’s laws, its courts, its “justice system,” and its politicians all back the police in carrying out their wanton killings and brutality because that’s the job this system needs them to carry out.

Two decisions this week illustrated this truth... yet again.

DA Refuses to Charge Stephon Clark’s Murderers

On the night of March 18, 2018, Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old Black man and father of two young children, was gunned down by two Sacramento police who unleashed a hail of 20 shots—in his grandmother’s backyard! An independent autopsy conducted by Dr. Bennet Omalu—best known for his work in highlighting concussive damage to football players—proved the cops’ story that Stephon was advancing on them pointing what they thought was a gun was a complete lie. According to Dr. Omalu, Stephon Clark “had his back to the officers” the entire time. And Stephon had no gun—only a cell phone.

Yet this Saturday, March 3, 2019, the Sacramento County DA announced that no charges would be filed against either of the murdering pigs. Never mind the evidence brought forward by Stephon’s family. Never mind that the pigs executed him 10 minutes—10 minutes!—after being called to investigate a vandalism complaint (not a violent crime). Never mind that six of the shots that the killers fired hit Stephon as he was falling down or already on his knees. And never mind that the police didn’t identify themselves until three minutes after they’d opened fire, or that Stephon didn’t receive any medical attention for six minutes.

Never mind any of that—the DA cold-bloodedly declared that “a human being died,” but no crime was committed because “police officers are legally justified in using deadly force ‘if the officer honestly and reasonably believes’ he is in danger of death or injury.” (New York Times, March 3, 2019). Then she repeated the same lie that Stephon was advancing on the pigs and they supposedly thought he was pointing a gun at them.

Department of IN-Justice Refuses to Charge Terence Crutcher’s Executioner!

On September 16, 2016, after Terence Crutcher’s car stalled, he got out, apparently to get help. Then the Tulsa police came. Videos show Terence, a Black man, walking slowly to his car with his hands up, away from the police. Terence reaches his car and puts his raised hands on the side of his SUV. By then four cops are about 10 feet away, guns drawn. Terence barely moved, if at all, yet within seconds one cop tased him, and then another—Betty Jo Shelby—shot him dead.

On May 17, 2017, America’s “justice system” let the murdering pig Shelby, who was charged with manslaughter, walk free after she claimed she feared for her life—that Terence may have been reaching for a gun inside his car. But there was no gun and no evidence of threatening moves, in fact prosecutors argued, according to the New York Times (May 17, 2017), that Shelby “fired several seconds before the gesture the defense cited as the basis for her fear.”

Now adding outrage to outrage to outrage, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday, March 1, that there was “insufficient evidence” to pursue federal civil rights charges against Shelby, who’s white, for murdering Crutcher—never mind that video and audio recordings clearly show how the execution went down. So what, the DOJ basically says, “the evidence in this case did not support pursuing criminal prosecution.”

How many more times? How long must this go on?

How many more unarmed Black and oppressed people have to be gunned down in cold blood, for no good reason or no reason at all, before enough is enough!?

How many more times do we have to hear the blatant, vicious lie—designed to kill the victim and wound their loved ones all over again—that the murdering pigs “feared for their lives”—even when video evidence shows there’s no goddamn way they could have been afraid!?

How long do these horrors have to go on, and on, before they’re finally put an end to?!

The answer: as long as this system continues to exist these horrors will go on and on and on, and they will only end when this system is overthrown through communist revolution!

See also:

“#Stephon Clark. Say His Name!” Sacramento Pigs Shot Unarmed Stephon Clark Six Times in the Back! revcom.us, April 2, 2018

“Pig Who Murdered Terence Crutcher Walks Free—Enough Is Enough!,” revcom.us, May 18, 2017

“Terence Crutcher Murdered in Cold Blood in Tulsa, Oklahoma... Do NOT Let This Go Down...Do NOT Let This SYSTEM Continue One Minute Longer Than Necessary,” revcom.us, September 20, 2016

Bob Avakian: Yes there's a conspiracy, to get the cops off.

Protesting the murder of Stephon Clark in Sacramento.  (Photo: AP)

People protest murder of Terrance Crutcher in Tulsa.

Get Organized for An ACTUAL Revolution to Emancipate All Humanity

Reports from the Field

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Intervening with BEB at the Bernie Sanders kickoff rally in Brooklyn

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

New York City Revolution Club went out to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign kickoff rally in Brooklyn on Saturday morning, March 2. Thousands of people, including many students and young people, lined up for hours to get in, excited to hear their progressive democratic socialist candidate talk about “healthcare for all,” tuition-free college, and taxing Wall Street to fund all this. We showed up with a big BEB poster (as featured on the revcom website) which has the faces of current Democratic Party candidates, including Bernie, alongside a picture of Trump and Pence with the letters BEB across each picture. A thousand flyers of this same graphic were distributed down the line while people waited to get in. This created a buzz going into and at the rally. Also, some of us were able to get onto the bleachers that back-dropped Bernie Sanders and we held up signs that had BEB taped over Bernie’s official rally poster. (The organizers had the police escort us off the stage after a while but the BEB signs and people wearing revcom T-shirts back-dropped  Bernie for a whole chunk of his speech.)

After the rally ended, shit just broke loose! Everyone passing by was demanding to know “What is BEB?” Many were upset that Bernie’s (or Ocasio-Cortez’s) picture was next to others like Trump and Pence. Some people tried grabbing the big posters and bending them. Others were yelling and screaming, in the dark about what could all these politicians possibly have in common? We challenged people to take a guess? (Check out the short video on this page that gives a flavor of this). After a little while, more and more people were not just provoked but challenged to think through, what could these different politicians all possibly have in common, and actual attempts at answering: what the hell does BEB stand for?

In addition, the NYC Rev Club wrote a short polemic hitting at some of the key ways that Bernie is playing people. (Just over 900 of these got out to the crowd as well.) It was important to have been at the rally because the very people who were there are people who care about and want to see an end to one or several of what we call the “5 STOPS” (deep and defining contradictions of the system for which they have no solution that’s in the interest of humanity) but the direction they are being led in, to get behind Bernie and the Democratic Party, is doing a great deal of harm and this needs to be challenged. The so-called “democratic socialist” solutions are no solution and so many who would like to see a better world are being funneled and fooled back into the embrace of the same system of capitalism-imperialism that’s the source of all this oppression and exploitation and madness. The reality is: This system cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown!

Spread on social media

From Revolution Club, Los Angeles:

At UCLA Campus: "We had challenged the whole framework that keeps these students sleepwalking through a nightmare and this sharply polarized the people"

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Last Wednesday the Revolution Club went to an open mic on the UCLA campus called The Word on Wednesdays. It’s a very progressive crowd of mostly Black and Latino students who are loosely in the “woke” scene on campus. We went to read poetry, and announce the upcoming You Think You’re Woke... But You’re Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare–This System Cannot Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown! The Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour.

Someone from the Revolution Club stepped up to the mic and read parts from the Call—including doing a pretty short and sharp polemic on intersectionality. The room began to tremor and faces visibly contorted as if the crowd had bit into a lemon.

The Club member went on to read the title of their poem “The Women of the World.” They begin to read their poem....

In Somalia the rain does not fall
So we must sell our only daughter
In Myanmar police burn my village
Drown my dark-skin baby in the r...

Before the Revolution Club member could read another word, they were shut down by the emcee saying, “You can’t just come up in here and criticize intersectionality and then go on to read a poem about women all over the world.” Another woman got up and said “by criticizing intersectionality you are discounting all of the people in the room,” and quickly the argument got boiled down to the lowest common denominator and what really concentrates the problem with this whole way of looking at the world: “You are a white man.”

Despite the fact that the Revolution Club represents the interests of all of humanity and is fighting to end all oppression—the organizers and most of the people there felt that it was not the place of this Revolution Club member to criticize intersectionality—and it was especially abhorrent that they wrote a poem speaking about oppression he has never directly experienced.

After being shut down and called out—a crowd of people shouted down any debate and forced out the Revolution Club members, all while threatening to call the campus police. Riotously applauding after the Revolution Club had been forced out into the hall where campus security appointed by the police department were waiting.

The Revolution Club left campus that night, debating amongst ourselves what had just happened. We identified that it was overwhelmingly positive what had just happened. We had challenged the whole framework that keeps these students sleepwalking through a nightmare and this sharply polarized the people. So we started developing a plan that could further break things open on campus and create more polarization, creating more sharp debate over intersectionality vs. the emancipation of humanity.

We went back to campus the next day posting the censored poem all over campus and mass distributing it. We went onto the Bruin Walk and started agitating about what happened the night before:

“During Slavery, would the slaves have wanted all the white people to ‘stay in their own lane’ and insisted they do not speak on oppression they do not directly suffer?

“During Nazi Germany, would the Jews in concentration camps have insisted that the German people ‘stay in their own lane’ and not speak out against the oppression they do not directly suffer?

“Do you think the 15,000 immigrant children who sit in America’s concentration camps on the border today would insist that all the people who have not experienced that ‘stay in their own lane’ because they have never seen the inside of cages?

“No, that’s BS, and it’s a cop-out. If something is wrong it is wrong, and no matter what your identity you have a responsibility to speak out about it and fight to stop it. I don’t care if you are Black or white, male or female, queer or straight. And if you are more concerned that a white man is standing up here ‘taking up too much space’ than you are with ending the horrific oppression he is speaking on—then you are a part of the problem.”

This agitation really challenged people and stopped a crowd of about 20 people while impacting hundreds. A woman in the crowd who had been at the open mic the night before started challenging the Revolution Club member on the mic, and an open debate broke out on the spot. She was saying how you change things isn’t by taking up the spaces of women of color, that it wasn’t by yelling at students on Bruin Walk, but was by getting inside the system and changing it from the inside. She mentioned AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and the Green New Deal, and demanded to know what concrete policies we have passed.

We went back and forth—taking on how all she was talking about was getting some oppressed faces on the top of this murderous system. We shouldn’t want women and people of color to get in on oppression, we need to overthrow the system that is at the root of all of this. AOC and the Green New Deal are just talking about taking some of the blood money that the imperialist extract through exploitation and violence and spreading it around. We don’t need a bigger share of the imperialist pie, we don’t want their blood money. We do need to save the environment, but that can only be done by getting rid of the system that is the root of the problem.

After she felt her arguments were exhausted, she put it back to us: “OK then how are you going to solve the problem?” The debate went on going back and forth over the strategy to make a revolution and overthrow the system. The more we went back and forth about the strategy in HWCW (HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution)—the more the crowd wanted to get their hands on HWCW and read it.

This was an example of how things can break out. How only by challenging these frameworks and masses of people seeing the revolutionaries sharply compare and contrast all these dead-end solutions to the new communism developed by Bob Avakian, can we actually build a real mass movement for revolution. We are continuing to work to wrench all the freedom we can out of this situation. We are spreading the word about an open-air debate we will have on campus this Monday [March 4]. This is just a report for now and we will write more correspondence after Monday.

Censored by The Word On Wednesday's Identity Politics Hustlers:
A Poem by A Revolutionary Communist Entitled "The Women of the World"

March 2, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The following is an op-ed submitted by the Revolution Club, Los Angeles, to the Daily Bruin, campus paper at UCLA.

At the most recent Word on Wednesday [open mike at UCLA], a member of the Revolution Club was interrupted and prevented from reading the poem included below.

The Revolution Club is holding an open-air debate and dialogue on Monday [March 4], on Bruin Walk at 12 pm on the following questions:

** Is it possible for there to be art or movements for fundamental social change if only the people who directly experience a particular form of oppression have a right to speak and lead?

** Intersectionality claims to make the connections between different forms of oppression, but its outlook forbids you from understanding the underlying roots of oppression and how to end it. It has no program for revolution and instead keeps you locked into begging and bargaining for piddly reforms and a seat at the table of a system that is destroying the lives of billions around the world.

These issues being debated matter! Come, take a side and argue your position, or admit you have no argument you can back up.

Here is the poem that was censored.

The Women of the World

In Somalia the rain does not fall
So we must sell our only daughter
In Myanmar police burn my village
Drown my dark-skin baby in the river

In Thailand I’m strapped to a bed
Red light district, buyer’s pleasure
In Jordan my feet burn from blisters
22 millenniums a day we walk for water

In South Sudan I drop to my knees
I’m unseen as I’m dying from hunger
In Lebanon I’m freezing in a shelter
I pray the cold won’t last much longer

In America where skinny is pretty
I’m 12 and if I eat I’ll be ugly
In India blood rolls down my legs
I’m worried nobody will believe me

In Nepal I scream but no one comes
On my period, in a cell, locked away
In Saudi Arabia my face is hidden
Beneath where the burqa is draped

In Malaysia the blade cuts my body
Negation, female genital mutilation
In Mexico the blade cuts my throat
Yet a dahlia is the symbol of a nation?

In England, under no street lights
Fighting him might only make it worse
In Pakistan he threw acid in my eyes
After I said “NO!” and now I’m cursed

In Honduras my children shed tears
We flee in fear to the jaws of the USA
In Libya I stand on an auction block
I’m to be sold as a modern day slave

In Sierra Leone I cannot be a mother
The world’s capital for maternal death
In El Salvador I’m forced to be a mother
Without the right to be free, what is left?

In South Africa it is far more likely
That I will be raped than graduate
In Yemen, skin & bones, I’m nothing
On the brink of collapse lies my fate

In the Congo my insides are torn
Where rape is a weapon of war
In Sweden men cover my mouth
I don’t think i want to live anymore

In the future I could be fully human
With dreams and a heart and a brain
But in the present I am a woman
Rotting away in tradition’s chains

You Think You Are Woke...
But You Are Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare

Get Organized for An ACTUAL Revolution to Emancipate All Humanity

Updated November 10, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Noche Diaz Presenting the Lifetime Fire Extinguisher Award to Al Sharpton at the Sacramento, CA State Capitol.

Prison Abolition: How to Feel “Woke” Without Fundamentally Changing a Thing

A REVOLUTIONARY Intervention from Tala Deloria
Revolution Club member and UCLA student

February 23, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

If you’re serious about ending mass incarceration and police terror, you need to be talking about the OVERTHROW of this system. Anything short of this, in the final analysis, is bullshit.

This system of capitalism-imperialism is what’s driving the genocidal police terror and mass incarceration of over 2 million people, over half Black, Latino and Native American men and women. This same system terrorizes the globe with wars for empire, economic sanctions, coups, bombing and torture. It drives people from their homelands in desperation for a life and livelihood and then warehouses them in detention centers and concentration camps at the border. This same system enforces vicious misogyny, oppressive gender relations and has now brought to power a fascist regime reigning through undisguised dictatorship and intensified repression, concentrating the naked vileness that makes up the heart of America. This system CANNOT be reformed!

“...we have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!” – Bob Avakian (BA), the leader of the revolution, from the speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can REALLY Make Revolution.

In opposition to revolution, what is the meaning of Angela Davis’ call for “abolition democracy”?

“...as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.” – From Are Prisons Obsolete?

This an argument for a paltry set of reforms. Illusions and delusions that will never be achieved under capitalism. In the same speech mentioned above, BA shows:

“White supremacy and capitalism—they have been completely interwoven and tightly ‘stitched together’ through the whole development of this country, down to today; to attempt to really put an end to white supremacy while maintaining the system of capitalism would tear the entire fabric of the country apart.”

To the degree any of Davis’ proposed reforms could be won under this system, the resources for this would come from America’s blood-sucking exploitation of the people of the world.

In the face of the desperately urgent need for real fundamental change, all “abolition” is doing is training you to nibble around the edges, begging and bargaining for a piece of the bloody imperialist pie. Those who do care about the nightmare of mass incarceration are funneled into endlessly working within – and even strengthening – the same system that causes this. This gets you to contribute to the tried and true hustle that this system can “do well by doing good,” while it keeps grinding up billions here and around the world.

Reality check: We live in a brutal capitalist dictatorship. This oppressive economic and social system is enforced by an illegitimate state power, a violent apparatus of repression and suppression. They keep oppressed people – Black, Latino and Native American people – in line through arbitrary and blood-thirsty police and vigilante terror. In every corner of the globe, it’s the US army with their bombs and torture, CIA backed-coups, and proxy wars that enforce the US’ dictates, global domination and plunder of resources.

This system’s violent hold on power does need to be broken. But that will take nothing short of an ACTUAL revolution: “Revolution where millions go up against, defeat and dismantle the system’s armed forces of violent suppression. Revolution that sets up a totally new power, with a different economy and different ways people relate to each other.” – From Time To Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution, Message from the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party

The leadership exists for this revolution in Bob Avakian: the most radical revolutionary on the planet who has developed a new synthesis of communism which includes a constitution with a re-envisioned legal framework and concept of justice for a future socialist society aiming to uproot all the oppressive and antagonistic divisions plaguing humanity. (At revcom.us/socialistconstitution)

Revolution IS possible and we are getting organized for this revolution NOW. There are answers for HOW to make revolution in this imperialist beast and HOW to bring forward the needed millions to do that. There is a strategy for this, concentrated in How We Can Win—How We Can Really Make Revolution, a battle plan for revolution from the Revolutionary Communist Party and further developed in the speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can REALLY Make Revolution (at revcom.us).

This is a leaflet that the Revolution Club Chicago is passing out at Louis Farrakhan's February 17 'Saviours' Day' speech:

Stop Being Farra-CONNED!
We Don't Need to GET IN ON Oppression, We Need to END Oppression
Get With the Real Revolution

February 16, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Welcome to Farrakhan’s “Saviours’ Day” message, where he will tell you how after 400 years of being bitterly oppressed, you should now learn to be a more obedient slave, prove you can be useful to your oppressors in hopes of negotiating a better deal and becoming their junior partners, and look to an imaginary ruler in the sky to one day give you a chance to be big-time oppressors.

All the terror and torture and brutality inflicted on Black people since the beginning of the USA is God’s way of leading his chosen people to their destiny? What kind of sadistic, tyrant God would that be? And why should anyone want a destiny of becoming new rulers over others?

Farra-CON, with his worshipping of American capitalism and American chauvinism, his ridiculous Yakub story, his vicious attacks on Jews, and his disgusting patriarchal program of male domination over women and demonizing LGBTQ people, is selling oppressed people a package of trying to get in on oppression, not get rid of it.

If you want to follow a wanna-be oppressor who begs Donald Trump to give him land so he can try to set up his own version of Israel—a genocidal state that serves U.S. imperialism—while he organizes Black men to act like police against people who protest and rebel against this system, and trains people in a slave mentality... follow Farrakhan.

If you want to put an END to ALL oppression, get with the scientific theory and leadership we have for making an actual revolution to overthrow this whole system and emancipate all of humanity: the new communism forged by, and the ongoing work of, Bob Avakian (BA). BA has developed the science, the strategy, and the vision and concrete plan for a real revolution and a radically new society on the road to full emancipation.

Bob Avakian says,

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

Revolution Club Chicago 
(312) 804-9121 
revclub.chi@gmail.com
FB/Twitter @RevClubChi

revcom.us

You Can’t Change the World If You Don’t Know the BAsics

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Every week, Revolution features one quote from BAsics, by Bob Avakian, the handbook for revolution. We encourage Revolution Clubs and other readers, everywhere, to take the time to discuss the quote—the whole quote—and to write us at revolution.reports@yahoo.com with accounts of these discussions, or thoughts provoked in yourself by reading the quote.

Activist Under House Arrest and Facing Jail for Protesting America’s Detention of Immigrant Children

March 4, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On February 20, immigrant rights activist Patricia Okoumou climbed the Southwest Key building in Austin, Texas, to protest the U.S. government’s cruel detention of tens of thousands of immigrants under horrendous conditions, including children separated from parents. Southwest Key is the largest operator of immigrant prisons, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts each year. Okoumou, who yelled “Free the children!” as she climbed five stories of the building, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing.

Patricia Okoumou

This was not the first time Okoumou has carried out a dramatic climbing protest to speak out for immigrants. Last July, in an action that received worldwide attention, she scaled the base of the Statue of Liberty to protest the Trump/Pence regime’s “zero tolerance” anti-immigrant repression and the ripping away of thousands of immigrant children from their parents. She was found guilty of three misdemeanors and now faces a possible 18 months in prison at a March 19 sentencing hearing.

After the Austin protest, a judge in New York City in the Statue of Liberty case revoked Okoumou’s bail and ordered her confined to house arrest with an electronic ankle monitor.

An online petition demanding the dropping of the charges against Patricia Okoumou notes that even more has emerged about the atrocities being carried out against immigrants: “The federal government has ripped apart tender-aged children from nursing mothers. It has flown thousands of young children across the country away from their families and placed them in cages. Some of The Children are being forcibly drugged and others sexually molested in internment camps. There have been deaths of asylum seekers, as young as 7 years old, under the care and custody of border patrol agents and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE).”

The border between the U.S. and Mexico was forged in the mid-1800s through an unjust war in which the U.S. stole over half of Mexico’s land in an attempt to expand slavery. Since then, this border has stood for the Yankee domination and plunder of a whole continent. And now, the American fascist-in-chief has proclaimed a state of emergency to gain the funds to build his monstrous border wall—an escalation in the war on immigrants and a declaration by the Trump/Pence regime that the millions seeking refuge in this country have no rights at all.

Standing up against the wall and the repression of immigrants is righteous and just. The REAL CRIMINALS are those who rule over the system that carries out these, and countless other, horrors against the people around the world.

Fascists and Pelosians Have No Right to Condemn Anybody...

Blaming "the Benjamins" Whitewashes Reality: The U.S. Backs Israel Because It Is an Enforcer for the U.S. Empire

Updated March 11, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

In February, newly elected Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar responded to a tweet by journalist Glenn Greenwald that it is “stunning” how much American politicians defend Israel, with “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.” She got blasted for her tweet, and not just by Trump and Republicans but by leading Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, who sponsored a “bipartisan” resolution in the Congress demanding Omar apologize for “use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters.” All this set off a wave of vicious attacks on Omar and Muslims in general, including a poster at a West Virginia Republican rally associating Omar (who is an immigrant from Somalia, which had no connection with the attacks of 9/11) with 9/11. Omar has said that “Assassinate Ilhan Omar” is written on gas stations near her house.

In response to the furor, Omar “unequivocally apologize[d]” for the tweet, saying she was “grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.”

Basic point number 1: Donald Trump said there were “good people” among the murderous fascist mob chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia. His regime has legitimized Nazis and created a climate that produced the most lethal anti-Semitic massacre in U.S. history, the mass killing at a Pittsburgh synagogue last October. Any leading figure who can uphold, or tolerate, or “reach across the aisle” to a fascist regime like that has very obviously forfeited any right to speak on who and what is anti-Semitic. So those people should shut up.

But point number 2: No amount of Benjamins ($100 bills) buys or sells strategic allies for this bloody-jawed empire. All the conspiracy theories about how the Israel lobby represents—as Omar insisted in a follow-up tweet—“allegiance to a foreign country” channel the outrage people in this country and around the world feel at Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people into looking at the world through the lens of what is in the national interest of the United States! And when you look at the world through that lens, you are on your way to complicity with the ongoing crimes of an empire built on genocide, slavery, and wars of empire.

Why does the U.S. back Israel? Because for decades, over and over again, from South Africa to Guatemala, and especially in the oil-rich and geographically strategic Middle East, Israel has served as a hit man for the interests of the U.S. empire. Israel’s massive high-tech military, gruesome torturers, assassins, and “advisors” have been unleashed over and over in service of the U.S. to back brutal oppressors and crush popular uprisings. Look up “Israel apartheid nuclear weapons” or “Israel Guatemala Ríos Montt” online. And Israel plays a critical role in U.S. conflicts with rivals like Russia (particularly in the bloodbath in Syria) and in escalating war moves against Iran.

That role—as a nuclear-armed attack dog for the U.S. empire—explains the billions of dollars the U.S. sends to Israel every year and the unflinching U.S. support for Israel’s invasions of its neighbors and ongoing terrorist ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The Israel lobby is not “successful” because it represents the interests of Israel (which it does) or the masses of Jewish people (which it does not); it is “successful” because its agenda coincides with the needs of an empire that sits atop a world of bone- and spirit-crushing exploitation and environmental devastation enforced through torture, terror, and unjust wars. Israel is an essential link in that chain.

You want to make the terms of things the national interests of the United States? Defenders of Israel will win that one every time. Let them have it. The national interests of the United States are the problem in this world. Nothing good can come trying to serve them, and nothing good can come from providing cover for the U.S. empire by serving in its Congress.

Editors’ note: Since this article was written, the House overwhelmingly passed a bi-partisan resolution similar to the one described in this article. It added wording that "also acknowledges the harm suffered by Muslims from harassment, discrimination and violence and condemns anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against all minorities."

"We are not some shooting target"

Pigs Who Murdered Stephon Clark Walk Free...Sacramento Rocked Again with Protests and Student Walkouts

March 8, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From a reader:

Hundreds of students took to the streets of Sacramento on Thursday, March 7 to protest the refusal of Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert to indict the pigs who murdered unarmed Stephon Clark¹ a year ago. The Sacramento Bee described the protest as “a boisterous and at times angry four-hour march to the state Capitol.” The students chanted “Cops can’t stop the revolution” and “Whose streets? Our streets!”

The students walked out of Sacramento City College and Sacramento High School, where Clark was a student. They took over the city streets, blocking traffic, as they wound their way to the steps of the Capitol, where Joshua Robinson, a City College student, read a letter to the city calling the DA’s decision (not to indict) “a shame on her office” and “a stain on the city.”

The Bee reported that Robinson “said the two officers should be fired for failing to ‘de-escalate before recklessly firing 20 shots in the dark at Stephon Clark,’ and demanded authorities drop charges against the 84 protesters who were arrested after a march in East Sacramento Monday night.”

Robinson, in speaking of a long history of gun violence against Black youth, referred to the fact that the Black Panther Party had been fighting this 50 years ago. The Bee article pointed out that “The march (today) comes 52 years after the Black Panthers made national news for marching to the state Capitol armed. Leader Bobby Seale of Oakland read a statement calling for the public to take note of legislation that intends to keep communities of color ‘disarmed and powerless’ while ‘racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.’”

This was the fifth consecutive day of protest that is rocking the city since the Sacramento County DA made the ruling on Saturday not to indict the cops who murdered Clark last March 18. Then on Tuesday, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said that he would not file charges against the murdering pigs. That night, at the Sacramento City Council meeting, an angry crowd shouted down council members and local leaders, forcing the council members to flee the room and shut down the meeting.

At the march, Sheku Baryoh, a Sacramento City College Student, told the press, “Police have to answer to us. We are not some shooting target. I’m [not a shooting target] because I’m a Black person.”

Yashar Yisrael, who attends Sacramento Charter High School, joined the march with his friends. He said, “Stephon Clark could have been any of us. We want to show this is something that relates to us.”

Thursday’s student walkout was organized by campus chapters of the Black Student Union, who demanded that the DA resign and the murdering cops be fired. They also called for the DA to expunge prior cannabis-related criminal convictions for all Sacramento citizens, pushed for a more diverse faculty at Sacramento Charter High School, and said they want Sacramento City Unified, Twin Rivers and Natomas Unified School Districts to end their contracts with school resource officers (cops) who are stationed on K-12 campuses in the region. They also marched in support of California Assembly Bill 392, which attempts to put limits on the definition of “justifiable homicide” when a cop kills someone.

These are righteous protests that must continue until these killer cops are jailed.  But there is more that must be demanded. As the revcom.us article “#Stephon Clark. Say His Name!”: Sacramento Pigs Shot Unarmed Stephon Clark Six Times in the Back! put it:

How many more times will we have to listen to pigs—and this whole system that backs them—“justify” their utter depravity toward Black, Latino, and Native American young people by saying “we thought he had a gun”? This time, once again, there was no gun. These police killings, over and over again, are not accidents. They are not the result of “lack of training” or “bad policies.” Why do they get away with it almost every time? Because they are doing what they are supposed to do as armed protectors of the system that rules over the people.

Enough Is Enough! Time’s Up for This System! No More!

1. See revcom.us articles on the police murder of Stephon Clark here and here. [back]

"Police murder... and the murderous logic of this system's election game."
by Bob Avakian

Students walked out of Sacramento City College and Sacramento High School, where Clark was a student.

From Revolution Club, Los Angeles:

JUSTICE FOR STEPHON CLARK! THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL!
WE NEED A REVOLUTION!

March 9, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Last week, in the midst of the protests against the cold-blooded pig murder of Stephon Clark and the IN-justice System’s refusal to indict his killer-in-blue, the Sacramento Bee pointed out that 52 years ago this month the Black Panther Party marched inside the Capitol with guns. They quoted Bobby Seale saying back then that “racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people.” That was over 50 years ago but it could’ve been said yesterday! Not only has this murder and brutality never gone away, in many ways it is worse—including that there are now 10 times as many people in prison as there were back then, and the majority are Black or Latino. This oppression is interwoven into the blood and bones of this capitalist-imperialist system.

Ask yourself: Are we going to protest for days or weeks and then allow our anger to be corralled and swept into the killing confines of this system that shows us over and over again that you can’t vote this shit away or tweak some law that will somehow make pigs stop killing our youth? Will another 50 years go by until it’s our grandkids dying outside of our doorsteps and all we can do is cry while the murdering pigs who killed them stand over their bodies “getting their stories straight”? Fuck that!

“Let’s get down to basics: We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.”
—Bob Avakian, leader of the revolution

Think about it:

Murder after brutal murder of Black and Brown youth by this system’s pig enforcers have continued nonstop for way too goddamn long and it must STOP.

Stephon Clark, a young Black male, gets murdered in his grandmother’s backyard, shot in the back and riddled with bullets and then they tell us that they aren’t going to prosecute the pigs who killed him. Once again, this system is telling you that they have no future for our youth, that they’ve never counted for anything to the people who run this system other than as a thing to be exploited and now that they can’t make a buck from working them in some field or in some factory, they unleash their whole repressive force against them. From the pigs who murder us in the streets to the prisons that hold us in huge numbers, to the courts that justify this whole murderous repression, the whole damn system is guilty! And anyone, whether it’s some lying ass politician or some well-intentioned reformist, who tells us that we have to rely on that system, or work within it, are telling a big lie.

People in righteous outrage and in a much needed show of defiance have taken to the streets, protested in city hall, walked out of school, and marched on the Capitol. The authorities have reacted with mass arrests. This fight must go higher, but it must be transformed, through struggle, into revolutionary understanding, determination, and organization.

This can be done. Yes, in many ways things are worse than they were 50 years ago. But in one BIG way we have something that we did not yet have back then: we have the science, the strategy, and the blueprint for a new society, and we have the leadership in Bob Avakian (BA) who has brought that forward. If you are serious about fundamentally changing this madness, if you really want to STOP the terror and brutality and all the other outrages of this system, then the most urgent thing you can do is to go online to check out BA’s speech, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution!

We, the Revolution Club, are actively organizing people NOW around BA’s strategy and vision, working on a plan to bring down this whole system when the time is right and bring into being a far better society. We have a bold plan for the next year to put revolution on the map in a huge way and to take things further from there. We ARE building a movement for revolution—NOW. And YOU need to be part of this.

Revolution Club, Los Angeles