Spread BAsics 1:14 Far and Wide
July 21, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
On Tuesday, July 1, busloads of immigrants were being transported to a detention center in Murrieta, California (in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles). The buses were met with an anti-immigrant howling mob chanting “go home.” Facing off these Minutemen-type vigilantes were a pro-immigrant group that included the artist Lupillo Rivera, calling out the inhumanity of these reactionaries. As the buses were sent back to the San Diego border area, a few people who saw the news ran out with signs welcoming the buses.
The “Summer 2014: Making Advances...Toward Revolution” editorial makes an important observation that:
Revolutions are built by going into the heart of the most intense contradictions in society, leading people to stand up and politically battle back against that...putting that resistance in the context of a way and a strategy to change the world through revolution...and leading people to change themselves as they change the world.
This intense and developing crisis for the system—what to do about these children—urgently calls for bringing the entire ensemble of revolutionary work—but especially BA Everywhere—into this picture as part of the above change we need. It is critical for people who are being “jolted” by this event to find not only WHY this is happening, but also what is the way out of this madness.
Now I can just hear these reactionary fools saying, “Well, Bob, answer me this. If this country is so terrible, why do people come here from all over the world? Why are so many people trying to get in, not get out?”...Why? I’ll tell you why. Because you have fucked up the rest of the world even worse than what you have done in this country. You have made it impossible for many people to live in their own countries as part of gaining your riches and power.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:14
BAsics 1:14 needs to spread far and wide—and revcom.us should appear on national media to respond to those reactionary fools waving American flags in Murrieta and elsewhere.
At a recent discussion at Revolution Books about the immigration surge at the U.S.-Mexico border, questions arose about why and who are people coming to the U.S. A particular wild and sharp exchange took place over someone who felt we should be outraged about the conditions for Black children/people in the U.S. (WE ARE!)—but posed it AGAINST the outrage about the treatment of the immigrants' children.
There was back and forth about what is the condition in the countries where people are fleeing and how the political and economic domination of these countries by the U.S. over many decades have created unbearable living conditions. There was struggle over why we should NOT pit the oppressed against each other, why it’s the system that is to blame and how it serves the system oppressing us all to blame each other.
The pictures of the reactionary mob in Murrieta brings to mind the mobs that attacked and blocked Black children from getting into schools of the South.
It should not be underestimated how little people in this country understand about WHY so many people (and children) are risking their very lives to make the harrowing journey crossing the U.S.-Mexico (and other) borders in order to simply survive.
Some months ago, The New York Times Magazine printed an article on quinoa recipes. In it, there was a relevant fact on the reality captured in BAsics 1:14: "...the worldwide demand for quinoa has become so high that many of those who live in the regions of Bolivia where the crop is grown can no longer afford to buy it."
The “worldwide demand” means parasitic imperialist citadels like the U.S. As with Bolivia and so many other countries in Central America or Mexico, the peasants can no longer afford the food they grow, driven off their land and into slums of those countries and now surging across the Mexico-U.S. border. It’s an ugly fact of capitalism-imperialism that people have no right to eat—even the very food they grow.
This is the irrational lopsided world capitalism-imperialism has created—the real people, real families, real children—behind the statistic that the U.S. is 5% of the world’s population but parasitically sucks up 25% of its resources.
This is the brutal relationship—the production (economic) relations—between the U.S. capitalist-imperialist system and the countries it dominates and oppresses that is compelling the immigrants surging across the U.S. border from Mexico and Central America in historically unprecedented numbers, including the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children as young as 5-6 years old.
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