Revolution #247, October 9, 2011
To all subscribers, old and new:
We are beginning a month of great promise. Suddenly, there are signs of life in America! In just this past issue, we covered:
- the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street and is now spreading across the country...
- the renewed hunger strike by prisoners in California’s maximum security and isolation prisons...
- the demonstrations against the legal lynching of Troy Davis in Georgia...
- plans for major non-violent direct action against the racist stop-and-frisk policy of the New York Police Department in mid-October—and the related plans, nationwide, for demonstrations on October 22 and in the week leading up to it, against police brutality and mass incarceration...
- the action by students at University of California in Berkeley taken against Republicans who were launching a racist attack on affirmative action...
- the protests opposing the development of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would double the amount of oil extracted from tar sands in Canada and greatly heighten the threat to the planet’s environment...
AND... in the midst of all this... the correspondence sent in by dozens of people responding to the challenge issued in BAsics by Bob Avakian.1
Right now many more people are beginning to question and resist what they usually accept. They need to hear and learn about the movement for revolution; they need to learn about the vision and theory brought forward by the movement’s leader, Bob Avakian; and they need to get connected with it. Without in any way hyping this, what is done—and what is not done—this autumn can have great consequences for all of our futures.
We are building a movement for revolution—and you are needed, right now, to play an active role in this movement.
What can you do?
- If you live nearby a city where there is a Revolution Books store, or if you can get to such a city, contact us—there are many, many things to do and connect with, from the great to the seemingly small. Every contribution is significant.
- Get into BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian—continue to engage the quotes, and read more deeply into BA’s other works which BAsics draws from. And get BAsics out: through posting quotes on the net, to distributing BAsics to others you know, to donating money to the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund so that more prisoners can get their hands on this, to just talking about with people you know.
- No matter where you live, get extra copies of Revolution newspaper and distribute them. If there is an occupation near you, take the paper with you to it and distribute it. If there is any struggle going on, take this paper out—help the revolutionary movement stretch a line into wherever people are righteously resisting.
- Donate money—and raise money. Help the movement for revolution get out literature and send out organizers to everywhere people are raising their heads, everywhere they are asking why, and—most especially—everywhere they are fighting back and thinking that there must be another way. This is a critical form of support—every dollar counts.
In short: Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution.
[Find out how a revolution could actually be made in a country like this. Check out “On the Strategy for Revolution,” by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, also available in BAsics pp. 103-112. And find out what such a revolution would do—including very concretely how a new state power could be set up and how it would function, to begin the transition to a world where people everywhere would be free of relations of exploitation and oppression and destructive antagonistic conflicts, and could be fit caretakers of the earth—read the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic of North America (Draft Proposal).]
* An Appeal to Those the System Has Cast Off
Here I am speaking not only to prisoners but to those whose life is lived on the desperate edge, whether or not they find some work; to those without work or even homes; to all those the system and its enforcers treat as so much human waste material.
Raise your sights above the degradation and madness, the muck and demoralization, above the individual battle to survive and to “be somebody” on the terms of the imperialists—of fouler, more monstrous criminals than mythology has ever invented or jails ever held. Become a part of the human saviors of humanity: the gravediggers of this system and the bearers of the future communist society.
This is not just talk or an attempt to make poetry here: there are great tasks to be fulfilled, great struggles to be carried out, and yes great sacrifices to be made to accomplish all this. But there is a world to save—and to win—and in that process those the system has counted as nothing can count for a great deal. They represent a great reserve force that must become an active force for the proletarian revolution.
—BAsics 3:16
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