This is a shout-out to the resisters coming to October 24

To the loved ones of those who’ve been murdered by police…

To the youths and students...

To the clergy and laypeople, the artists and the writers...

To the Black and Brown and Native people who refuse to bow down to centuries-old and modern-day discrimination and oppression...

To the immigrants, hounded wherever they go...

To the women and men, LGBT and straight…

To those who catch the brunt of this terror and those in the middle whose conscience cries out...

To the people who’ve been waging this struggle for years and the people just coming into it, and those battlers for justice on all the other fronts of society who will be in the streets on the 24th...

This is a shout-out to those who see the need to draw the line, to resist the powers that be, and to shake up the people who go along, to put out the challenge for the whole world to see and hear: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

This is a salute to the relatives of the murdered who will tell their stories on October 22, to those who lend their voices in support, and to those who will march when that is done. And this is a salute as well to the courageous ones who will put it on the line on October 23 to shut down Rikers Island, the concentration camp in the middle of New York City...

To all those and to all those working now to be there on the 24th, we say: RISE UP!

Rise Up October makes it plain: POLICE MURDER AND TERROR MUST STOP. Rise Up October means challenge and struggle. Rise Up October means determination not just to reform all this but to STOP it... to dare to call out and reverse a slow-motion genocide... to live a morality of justice and emancipation as we do... and to get ORGANIZED to make all that real...

Our Party and its leader, Bob Avakian, are determined to stand with Rise Up October… to fight with all our might to reverse this genocidal insanity… and to do all this as part of bringing into being a whole new world where such madness really IS no more and where all the other ways in which the seven billion human beings on this planet are exploited, oppressed, degraded, and diminished are overcome forever. We do this as part of preparing minds and organizing forces to hasten the advent of REVOLUTION, which is the only way that humanity can achieve its emancipation and truly bury its chains.

We will stand with you in struggle on these days. We salute your courage, your perseverance, and keeping your eyes on the prize.

And we invite you—we challenge you—to get seriously into the revolution... to get into and dig into the work of Bob Avakian, to watch his videos and read his writings... to follow our website, revcom.us... to run with the “revcoms” themselves, in the Revolution Clubs, fighting the power, and transforming the people, FOR revolution... and to come into our bookstores and meet the revolution.

The future can be ours. Let us dare to seize it.

Rise Up!

If you have had a chance to see the world as it really is, there are profoundly different roads you can take with your life. You can just get into the dog-eat-dog, and most likely get swallowed up by that while trying to get ahead in it. You can put your snout into the trough and try to scarf up as much as you can, while scrambling desperately to get more than others. Or you can try to do something that would change the whole direction of society and the whole way the world is. When you put those things alongside each other, which one has any meaning, which one really contributes to anything worthwhile? Your life is going to be about something—or it's going to be about nothing. And there is nothing greater your life can be about than contributing whatever you can to the revolutionary transformation of society and the world, to put an end to all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation and all the unnecessary suffering and destruction that goes along with them. I have learned that more and more deeply through all the twists and turns and even the great setbacks, as well as the great achievements, of the communist revolution so far, in what are really still its early stages historically.

Bob Avakian, BAsics 5:23

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