Why Righteous Rebellions Against Reactionary Pig Violence Are POSITIVE

June 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The following was part of a talk at a Revolution Club dinner that focused on getting out the Message from the Central Committee, "Time To Get Organized for An Actual Revolution."

 

Righteous rebellions against reactionary violence—like the Baltimore rebellion against the murder of Freddie Gray a year ago—are positive. It's important to emphasize this basic fact, because a lot of confusion and demoralization are being spread.

Such rebellions give people a sense of their own strength when they stand together. Such rebellions enable people to cast off the shame that the system puts on them for submitting to violence and domination. Such rebellions, when they righteously go up against the violence of the pigs, wake people up all over society. Rebellions against reactionary pig violence, like Baltimore 2015, can win support from others, in all sections of society—they make new alliances possible, and they inspire still others to stand up and many more to actually wake up and ask, for the first time in their lives, “WHY?” Such rebellions open up people’s minds to new possibilities, to the idea that the rulers are not all-powerful, that their system rests on nothing but armed reactionary violence and this violence itself is illegitimate, and that a better world must be sought and fought for.

Such rebellions, if revolutionaries provide the right kind of leadership, can enable people to get better organized...for revolution. They are big opportunities to let people know that there is a leadership, in Bob Avakian and the Party, and a path forward, in the form of the new synthesis of communism he's developed—and a strategy for an actual revolution.

And such rebellions are often the only way that people can get any justice whatsoever. After all, do you think these pigs in Baltimore would have even been indicted without people rising up?

So don’t let them tell you that rebellions against reactionary pig violence do no good. Righteous rebellions do a whole lot of good—if you want to get rid of ALL oppression, if you want to see a revolution, and if you want justice. Conversely, if you don’t rebel against reactionary violence, you won’t get revolution and you won’t get justice either—this we definitely know.

This is what happened with the Baltimore Rebellion of 2015. And this is why the enemy has worked so hard to reverse those lessons. So, of course, they come back at you. Of course, they try to lull you, to wear you down, to trick you, to slander you, to distract you... so that they can mock you and put you “back in your place.” In Baltimore, the police used their power and ties in the street to unleash a “crime wave,” causing confusion and “changing the subject.” They set up these trials and suddenly “forgot how to prosecute”—even though they were able to put other people, those who righteously stood up against the pigs, in prison for long terms.

They’re hitting back and they’re using the fact that they have the state power and we don’t—yet—in order to do it.

And then you have a choice. Carl Dix has called on people to learn from and put into practice the example of Muhammad Ali, who refused to fight in the U.S. Army against the people of Vietnam and did not buckle under when the powers came after him. This is overwhelmingly the most important thing about Ali and what people need to be learning and emulating, including right here and right now around Baltimore and other outrages like Baltimore.

But we should learn something else from Ali, and here we're talking about his time in the boxing ring: he didn't give up. He didn’t quit. He got knocked down, he got slammed against the ropes, he took tremendous punishment, but he always fought to figure out a way to come back harder, to find his opponent’s weaknesses, batter him and then finish him off, as he did to George Foreman, for instance, in Zaire.

As Ali himself said, he didn’t just have the skills, he had the will—and the will was more important. And as Bob Avakian has said, if you are making revolution, you can make and you will make a lot of mistakes—but do NOT make the biggest mistake of all—do not EVER give up.

Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution

 

 

 

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