50 Years After the March on Washington & “I Have a Dream” Amerikkka Is STILL a Goddamn Nightmare
WE NEED A REVOLUTION!

by Carl Dix | August 25, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

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It’s 50 years since the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Let’s face reality—Amerikkka is still a goddamn nightmare! This country built up its wealth and power by dragging Africans to these shores in slave chains and stealing the land from and committing genocide against the native inhabitants. It has never stopped bringing vicious oppression down on Black people and billions of people around the world. Dreams of changing America into something that would end this oppression, or any of the horrors inflicted on humanity, are toxic illusions that keep people chained to the very system that’s responsible for all this oppression.

This is not a time to be dreaming of “perfecting” America’s union. Instead, it must become a time that people look back on and say, that’s when people said you couldn’t reform this shit, and a whole different way—a revolution—was needed.

As Revolution (July 19, 2013 issue) put it, “58 years ago, a Black teenager named Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi by some white men who decided he had ‘acted wrong,’ and those white men were acquitted. Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, said ‘NO MORE’ and the uproar that she stoked was one big beginning factor that led millions of people to stand up and over the next 15 years to rock this country to its foundation. People needed revolution, and many fought for revolution, many of those heroically laid down their lives—but we got reforms. Now after all those reforms ... after all the promises ... all the excuses ... after all the Black faces in high places including even a Black president ... a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin is murdered by a white man who decided Trayvon was ‘acting wrong,’ and he too is acquitted.”

This verdict was America saying, once again, that Black people have no rights that whites must respect. This is a concentration of the way this system has criminalized Blacks and Latinos on a genocidal scale and created a generation of suspects at a time when it has no real future for tens of millions of these youth.

The Trayvon verdict left many, many people with a profound sense of betrayal and had them asking big questions about the unjust nature of this society and whether the people ruling over us are fit to run society. People are righteously outraged and asking: how long will such horrors continue and how many more of our youth will have their lives stolen for no reason other than the color of their skin?

America has had its chances to do right by Black people. First through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and then during the 1960s, when people struggled mightily to deal with the horrors Black people faced. And each time, America changed the forms of oppression but kept it in effect. What is the situation today? The New Jim Crow. More than 2 million people in prison; and more than five million formerly incarcerated facing discrimination when looking for work, and barred from living in public housing and receiving government loans. Racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and a school-to-prison pipeline. Voting rights being snatched back. It’s long past time to say, “That’s it for this system. Time’s up!”

There are those calling for a new civil rights movement. That’s not what’s needed. The old civil rights movement contributed to the struggle to end legal segregation, and people sacrificed heroically as part of it. But that movement had reached its limitations by the mid-1960s. It aimed to get America to make good on a promise of equality that cannot be achieved in the framework of this system.

From the “founding fathers” onward, this has been a system driven by the needs of capitalism and then capitalism-imperialism with its profit-above-all mentality and its expand-or-die logic. No civil rights movement is going to change that. We need a revolution to get rid of this system and bring a totally different and far better one into being.

And let’s pull the lens back. Everywhere America has gone in the world, it has wreaked havoc on humanity: from the slave trade in Africa centuries ago, to the theft of half the land of Mexico, to the genocidal war in Vietnam, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the U.S.-supplied tanks massacring people in the streets of Egypt. One in three women in the U.S. will suffer sexual assault in their lifetime. This country carries out the most massive spying operation in world history, targeting people and countries all over the world. The U.S. is ravaging the environment of the planet. As Bob Avakian, the leader of the RCP, has said: “What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.”

As for those who say, “things may be bad, but Obama is working on making them better,” people need to have the moral courage to face the truth. And that truth is that Barack Obama is the top enforcer and defender of this system. The truth is that Obama is the commander-in-chief of the American empire. The truth is that he presides over the drone strikes that destroy whole villages in Pakistan and Yemen. The truth is that he presides over the torture prison in Guantanamo Bay. The truth is that he has presided over an unprecedented number of deportations of immigrants.

The capitalist-imperialist system has only brought horrors to the world. But the good news is that things don’t have to be this way. There’s a whole other way that society could be organized—and through revolution, communist revolution, we can get rid of this system and bring a far better society into being. The kind of society that could end all exploitation and all oppressive divisions and inequalities all over the world, that could emancipate all of humanity and safeguard the planet for current and future generations. The kind of society and world in which human beings could truly flourish.

In Bob Avakian, we have the leadership needed for this revolution; a leader who came out of the 1960’s and who has given his heart and his knowledge, skill and abilities to dealing with everything that stands between humanity and its ultimate emancipation. He has deeply studied the experience of revolution—the shortcomings as well as the great achievements. He has drawn from other fields of human activity. And he has brought the science and method of revolution to a whole new level, concentrated in the new synthesis of communism. In Bob Avakian, we have a great champion and a great resource for people here, and indeed people all over the world.  

The Revolutionary Communist Party he leads has developed a strategy for making revolution when the time is right. And it has developed a vision of the kind of world we could bring into being through revolution, a vision that is concretized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) To bring all this about, we are building a movement for revolution NOW. And what’s missing is you.

All of our outrage, our energy and our dreams can become powerful fuel in this movement for revolution. This must be a watershed moment—one in which we break with the illusion of trying to make this system something it cannot be, but work and struggle to end this nightmare once and for all.

Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution!

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