The original Spanish version of this text was received from the Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia. The translation is the responsibility of revcom.us.
A real REVOLUTION is necessary, and possible
May 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
May 1, 2017
There is much that is at stake this May Day. There are big difficulties and dangers before the people and the planet itself, but there are also possibilities for big favorable transformations that depend on whether or not problems are approached with the approach and method of the science of revolution. The advances in the struggle around this would be the best tribute on the centenary of the October Revolution in Russia.
Talking about the dangers and difficulties of the situation is not a rhetorical statement: a fascist regime seeks to consolidate itself in the most powerful country on the planet... a serious threat of nuclear war hovers on the horizon... there are risks that it is no longer possible to control global warming due to the enthronement of climate change deniers... the misery and dangers generated by imperialism in the countries of the so-called third world makes more than one million people risk their lives every year in forced displacements to Europe... patriarchal oppression in a multitude of forms not only increases but is normalized...
The question of the need for and the possibility of revolution is not a rhetorical statement either. Yes, in spite of healthy outbursts of resistance, the trend towards COUNTER-revolution throughout the world has been consolidating itself, and the revolutionary movement itself is at a crossroads, between the revolutionary road and the dead-ends of bourgeois-democratic reformism and zombie dogmatism that by not letting “the dead bury their dead,” are becoming a residue of the past which contributes to making it difficult to reverse the current trend.
But on the basis of the scientific assessment of the great achievements and also of the limitations of the experiences (and theory) of the first stage of proletarian revolution, as well as of the understanding most widely attained by humanity since then, today a new framework for revolution has been achieved: the new synthesis of communism developed by Bob Avakian, which has put on a more scientific basis the revolutionary communism developed by Marx, Lenin and Mao. To make revolution, you need science.
People do not spontaneously understand the real nature of things; they do not look for the essence that lies beneath the appearance of things. It is crucial that there is a scientific approach and method (i.e., based on evidence, not on formulas, recipes or desires, nor on inferences based on biases) and that there is a growing body of organized people who really apply that science to understand and transform natural and social reality, towards an actual revolution, with sights on the emancipation of all of humanity. To make revolution requires an organized core that leads it.
As Ardea Skybreak emphasizes: “When people are deprived of a scientific approach to reality as a whole, they are robbed of both a full appreciation of the beauty and richness of the natural world and the means to understand the dynamics of change not only in nature but in human society as well.” Not having a scientific approach and method matters, a lot!
For example: Almost everywhere revolutionary communists face unfounded criticisms of the internationalist approach: “let’s first worry about what is happening here” (“my country,” “my region”), “what do the problems of other countries have to do with what happens here?... and so on ad nauseam, while those who criticize (even from the “revolutionary” camp) have no other, more complete or better analyses and/or syntheses about “what is going on here.” This way of thinking is linked to seeing the world (this capitalist-imperialist system) as a mere collection of countries.
Although chauvinism, localism, provincialism, and similar isms account for such recurrent thinking, a lot of people also reject the revolutionary solution, since in other cases the complaints are why do you only worry about women’s problems, or young people’s problems, or the problems of the universities, or the problems of the neighborhoods, or the cities, or the countryside, etc., depending on the actual struggle you are in... and, at the same time!, with complaints about why enclose them within something as broad as the current economic and social system.
Internationalism is not only a good idea; it has a very material basis. There really is a world imperialist system that is the common enemy of the people, whether it resides in imperialist citadels, where the imperialist beast is centered and has its foundations, or whether it resides in the large areas called the “third world,” the dependent and colonial countries.
The changes in recent decades, mainly a product of a new and greater globalization, make this clearer. “The proletariat in advancing the struggle can only advance it by approaching it, and seeking to advance it, on a world level first of all. This doesn't mean of course that you try to make revolution irrespective of the conditions in different parts of the world or the conditions within particular countries, but it means that even in approaching that you proceed from the point of view of the world arena as most decisive and the overall interests of the world proletariat as paramount. And that is not merely a good idea. It has a very material foundation, which has been laid by the system of imperialism.”1 Internationalism has a very material foundation that has been laid by the system of imperialism.
Proletarian internationalism is actually based on a concrete material reality. “[T]he world arena actually [is] decisive in terms of setting the basic conditions for revolutionary struggles, in particular countries as well as on a world level. On the other hand, this does not liquidate, eliminate, or diminish the importance of the revolutionary struggles in particular countries but in certain important respects gives a different focus to them and, yes, gives emphasis to a necessary concentration on those places where the objective and subjective factors combine to make it more possible to make breakthroughs.”2
It is also very important to emphasize that putting the international situation and the international arena first does not mean that in a specific country nothing can be done—and specifically that a revolutionary struggle cannot advance or possibly the revolutionary seizure of power cannot even be carried out—if at any given moment the international “correlation of forces” is not favorable.
An example of where things are decided “from here,” and also an example of dependency and subjugation, is the pathetic “casual encounter” in Mar-a-Lago (Florida, U.S.A.) by former Colombian presidents Pastrana and Uribe with Donald Trump to ask him to make his other pawn, current Colombian president Santos, toe the line, who is only developing a right-wing, and not a fascist, agenda.
As the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, points out, Fascism is an even more grotesque and overtly bloodthirsty form of the same system, which represents horrors for humanity and the planet, beyond what the current system already inflicts daily. This relationship of being qualitatively different, while sharing a common essence, constitutes “a unity of opposites.” What has been happening in the United States is not simply the transfer of power from one bourgeois to another. As a way of governing, fascism solves the contradiction between the essence and the appearance of bourgeois democracy by exercising the open form of bourgeois class dictatorship. It is a qualitative change.
Trump seeks to bludgeon his way to a new world order. In the same world that Colombia (and Peru, Syria, etc.) are part of. It is not only a problem of the people in the United States that a section of the ruling classes has come to take the reins of power which seeks to consolidate a fascist regime in the most powerful country in the world. This has serious and immediate (and long-term) planetary implications.
The threat of nuclear war with North Korea is getting real serious when the country that makes the threat is the United States, the only country that has already used nuclear weapons (against Japan in 1945), and which already killed more than three million Koreans in 1950-1953... And just weeks ago in Afghanistan, for the first time it used the most powerful bomb in its non-nuclear arsenal.
But there are many who are aware at different levels of the gravity of the situation, including the renewed and increased attacks on women, against science and truth, against scientists investigating climate change, against critical thinking, etc. The resistance in the United States, with worldwide repercussions, began the day after Trump’s inauguration with the Women’s March (January 21), then the March for Science (April 22) and the People’s Climate March (April 29), with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the main marches. Although this important response should not be overestimated, much less can it be downplayed.
An important favorable aspect of the situation in the United States is that there are revolutionary communists in that country, organized in a vanguard party and with a revolutionary leadership. (It is always enriching to consult the RCP’s newspaper: revcom.us, in Spanish and English.) For the revolutionary communists there, “The approach… in taking fascism on is not to return to what ‘was’ in Obama/Clinton, but to move forward toward replacing the whole goddamn system and bring about a radically different and far better society.” In contrast, the “united front against fascism” approach, in the 1930s and 1940s (and still among those who groundlessly criticize the RCP) erroneously separated fascism from the capitalist-imperialist system.
In Colombia, the trend towards fascistization took shape in the two Uribe governments (2002-2010) and has once again been on the rise becoming more integrated with religious fundamentalist movements. The fascistic sectors grew larger with the victory of the NO in the October plebiscite that sought to approve the Havana peace accords [with the FARC guerrillas], emboldened by the strength gained by Uribe’s followers and the religious fundamentalists in the marches against the so-called “gender ideology” and against corruption (of which their leaders are protagonists), perhaps longing to emulate the “march on Rome” that enthroned Mussolini.
In general, the process of the rightward shift seeks to defend and also goes hand in hand with the clampdown on the material conditions of life of the vast majority of the population. Billions of people live (survive) in precarious conditions, with grossly low incomes, and almost one billion suffer from starvation (mainly in Africa), while the daily expenditure to keep the military machinery running would be enough to meet for nine days the needs of food, health and education of the poor children of the planet.
With an organization of the production that even uses the environment on the basis of profit, ecosystems are on the verge of collapsing. The creativity of the working masses is constantly extinguished and marginalized. Women are turned into sex slaves, into trafficked products, and are denigrated, and violence against them has even been institutionalized in many parts. The attack on truth and science, the rise of the “post-truth” and such things reinforce the ideological offensive against revolution and communism, the only real way out of this madness.
Four decades since the end of the first stage of revolution, the slanders, distortions, and crude lies about socialism and communism are just becoming sharper. And the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia demands as well the sharpening up of fight to set the record straight in this regards.
Communist revolution aims to eliminate the capitalist-imperialist system and replace it with a radically different economic and political system, socialism. Socialist society is a transition, as part of a protracted world process, to reach communism, a world without exploitation, oppression and antagonistic social divisions. This revolution is the only real solution to horrors such as wars for empire, oppression of women, of oppressed nationalities, of immigrants, and the destruction of the environment... none of which can be solved under this system.
Communism is the achievement of the “4 Alls,” as summed up in a concentrated way by Marx, who specifically said that socialism is the transition towards the abolition of all class differences, of all relations of production on which they rest, of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, and the revolutionization of all ideas that correspond to those social relations. Nothing to do with “twenty-first century socialism,” “social-democracy,” “anti-neoliberalism,” or other reformist silliness!
The contrast is clear with respect to what is a prelude to growth of the rightward shift in the world... And the challenges are big. There is a “window of opportunity” for revolutionaries in the belly of the imperialist beast to advance in their efforts to lead thousands and then millions in a movement for revolution in order to stop the Trump/Pence regime, before it consolidates itself. The call to “wait and see” is criminal. The people of the United States and around the world need support all over the world in order to make real the possibilities of victory. There is no guarantee of victory. But what is guaranteed is that without struggle, the perspectives could not get any worse.
A better world is possible, a communist world!
Revolution, nothing less, is necessary!
Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia — May 1, 2017
1. Bob Avakian, Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement: Questions of Strategic Orientation, Revolution magazine, RCP Publications, Spring 1984. Available at revcom.us. [back]
2. "Revolution and a Radically New World: Contending 'Universalisms' and Communist Internationalism," an excerpt from the text of a talk by Bob Avakian, “Out Into the World—As a Vanguard of the Future,” to a group of Party members in the first part of 2008. [back]
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