What is the importance of the actions that have been called for on New Year’s Eve, from the standpoint of actually making revolution—at the soonest possible time?
December 20, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
If you really want a revolution, you have to start from what we need to get one. You need a crisis in the ruling class and government, in which the powers-that-be are fighting among themselves and the advocates of reforms find themselves scrambling and on the defensive; you need masses of people, in their millions, finding the old way of living intolerable and willing to put everything on the line to end it; and you need a powerful revolutionary organization, with wide influence and deep roots and an experienced and scientifically-oriented core, able to give leadership to all this.
We don’t have all that today. But we do have a huge social eruption around a contradiction that is at the very heart of this society: the oppression of Black people, and for which the ruling class has no fundamental answer. We do have a situation which has “[compelled] many people to question and to resist what they usually accept,” (from A Statement from the Revolutionary Communist Party: ON THE STRATEGY FOR REVOLUTION) and in which people are much more open to hearing and thinking about and taking up the revolutionary line, the revolutionary analysis of the problem and the solution, and what to do about all that right now. We do have a vanguard which does have a fundamental answer—a solution—to this and all the other horrors and outrages of imperialism, a way to not only resist them but to actually MAKE a revolution, and the orientation to make the most of situations like this FOR revolution. And we do have a situation in which “nobody can say exactly what the conscious initiative of the revolutionaries might be capable of producing, in reacting upon the objective situation at any given time—in part because nobody can predict all the other things that all the different forces in the world will be doing.” (From Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity, by Bob Avakian. This work is available as part of the Revolution pamphlet Revolution and Communism: A Foundation and Strategic Orientation. The citation is from p. 40.)
What we CAN say is that revolutionaries must work to push, and keep pushing, this situation as far as it can actually go, working along the lines laid out in the oft-reprinted “Some Principles for Building a Movement for Revolution,” by Bob Avakian (BAsics 3:30). This sheds important light on how revolutionaries should approach the actions being called for on New Year’s Eve. These actions should be as large and powerful as possible, rallying people who have been in the streets during this whole past period and rallying many more beyond them—people who have been inspired by all that, people who feel that they too “can’t breathe,” people who want to step out and step forward. Indeed, these demonstrations should, as Carl Dix put forth in his original call, be a time when people who are fighting on many different fronts to STOP the various outrages of this system all pour into the streets as well, around the slogan “No New Year With This Old System!” Revolutionaries should lead in reaching out very, very broadly to bring people to this.
At the same time, these demonstrations on New Year’s Eve should be a time when the fact that there IS a way out of this madness—that there is not only an understanding why the old system keeps doing what it does but a) what could be put in its place which could enable humanity to begin to overcome and transcend these horrors, and b) how this current system could be defeated for real in an actual revolution—is very much infused into all this. It should be a time when the leadership for this revolution—the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and its leader, Bob Avakian—get much more widely known, in various ways, including through the propagation of the recent dialogue between Bob Avakian and Cornel West (REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion—A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Bob Avakian), as well as through broad distribution of Revolution and promotion of the website www.revcom.us. It should be a time when the organized forces of the revolution dramatically and coherently project themselves and draw others, on the spot, towards and closer to these organizations.
In short, revolutionaries must view this from the vantage point of “Some Principles,” and on that basis “carry out work which, together with the development of the objective situation, can transform the political terrain so that the legitimacy of the established order, and the right and ability of the ruling class to rule, is called into question, in an acute and active sense, throughout society; so that resistance to this system becomes increasingly broad, deep and determined; so that the ‘pole’ and the organized vanguard force of revolutionary communism is greatly strengthened; and so that, at the decisive time, this advanced force is able to lead the struggle of millions, and tens of millions, to make revolution.”
It is from that framework that plans should be made and goals set, and progress toward those concrete plans and goals consistently evaluated.
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