To the Greens: Elections Under This System Will NEVER Transform Shit
We Need to OVERTHROW This System, Not Vote For It
We Need an ACTUAL REVOLUTION!

Updated August 8, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The Green Party platform promises to end poverty, cut the U.S. military budget in half, protect the environment, provide free access to education and health care to people in the U.S., demilitarize the police, end racism, and more. When everyone who is horrified by Trump's fascist madness is being told the only "alternative" is Hillary Clinton, the Green's candidate for president, Jill Stein, says, "Hillary Clinton has a very clear, lifelong—practically lifelong track record for locking up African Americans, for deporting immigrants, for serving the interests of Wall Street, being funded by Wall Street and the war profiteers. So, let's not pretend for a minute that Hillary Clinton's track record offers us any hope."

It's easy to understand why this has appeal. It is, indeed, completely unnecessary and intolerable for a tiny handful of capitalists to control the wealth produced by billions around the world in conditions of enforced suffering and brutality, for police to continue gunning down Blacks and Latinos, for the U.S. military to invade and plunder the world, and for the environment to every day be pushed closer to total catastrophe. And it is true that Hillary Clinton is part of the problem and there is no basis to place hope in her candidacy.

But the notion that these outrages can be ended by "voting Green" is a harmful delusion.

What Is the Problem?

Let's start with something very basic: The problem is NOT just the corporations or a "rigged" electoral system. The problem is that a capitalist-imperialist class rules and enforces the system of capitalism-imperialism on this society and the world.

Further, elections under this system are not part of a classless democracy, they are part of a bourgeois, or capitalist, democracy—that is to say, fundamentally a dictatorship within which people are allowed some forms of participation, so long as they do not directly threaten capitalist rule. And they've proven this to be a dictatorship time and again.

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You see, the people who really run this country have a tremendous amount of military power in their hands and any movement that actually threatens their ability to plunder the planet has immediately been dealt with by that armed force. This has not just been true throughout the history of this and every other capitalist country; there are many examples from just the past few years. Think of the tanks and tear gas and military weapons unleashed upon protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, after police murdered unarmed Michael Brown. Think of the coordinated violent police raids and mass arrests inflicted on the Occupy movement in cities across the country over a four-day period in November 2011. Think of the brutal mass arrest of revolutionaries just two weeks ago at Trump's RNC in Cleveland for burning the American flag—what is supposed to be a "constitutionally protected right" of free speech.

Any political program that doesn't seriously deal with that is like setting an unsuspecting person up on a date with a serial killer.

We need to OVERTHROW, not vote for, this system.

There is in fact a program and a strategy to do just that, based on a scientific analysis of society. There is leadership developing this, and an organized force working to make it real. And we're gonna get into that.

But first, let's look closer at the Green Party platform on its own terms.

The Green Platform: A Deadly Delusion

A Lesson from Greece on Why This Won't Work—And Why Revolution and Nothing Less Is Needed

The entire financial base in the U.S. has grown so wealthy BECAUSE of the vast network of international exploitation. Without that, the U.S. economy would disintegrate and there would be no capital to build or employ anyone.

There are rules that define how an economy operates in any social system. And if these rules—in the case of capitalism, an economy defined and driven by insatiable, competitive drive for profit—were thrown out of whack in the way the Greens propose, then one way or another, institutions of the capitalist class would step in through the courts, the media, and their machinery of violent repression to "restore order"—to bring the laws and public policy back in sync with the nature of the economic system. The rulers of the U.S. have done this over and over around the world when regimes attempt to implement reforms that the rulers of the U.S. find intolerable. And they would definitely do that in their own home base—the U.S.

There is a lesson in how this plays out in the real world from Greece. In 2015, the SYRIZA party candidate was elected prime minister of that country. SYRIZA promised major reforms to alleviate massive unemployment, the collapse of social services, and poverty (as well as other major changes in Greek law). But major international capitalist institutions (mainly German) threatened to strangle the Greek economy if those reforms were implemented. And so, whatever their intentions, the SYRIZA leadership signed on to renewing "austerity" measures that intensified poverty and inequality.

** The Greens rail against the staggering amount of money that is poured into the U.S. military and promise they'd redirect it towards education and health care for Americans. This is a military that terrorizes and murders and occupies around the world. This is not a "policy problem." Nor is this a product, mainly, of "war profiteers." This is the essence of America. Without the napalm, nuclear weapons, "special forces," and all the rest of the monstrous machinery, the U.S. couldn't enforce its global system of exploitation—from the sweatshops and fields and mineral mines stretching from Bangladesh to Africa to Central America and beyond. The U.S. military enforces exploitation around the world. And the U.S. military threatens or wages wars against rival countries or forces who it sees as a threat to its position dominating a global setup of capitalist-imperialist exploitation and oppression.

If the Greens somehow got in power, and even if they could somehow compel the military to withdraw even half its 800 bases worldwide, all this would mean is that the whole economic foundation of this country in its international exploitation and plunder would crumble. Where, then, would they come up with their funds for free education or health care for Americans?

No wonder this system has used its instruments of dictatorship to imprison and slander, to spy on and intimidate, to assassinate or disappear those who have challenged its military supremacy. You can't reform this or appeal to it, you have to overthrow it. And you have to do this as part of a whole international struggle all aiming at an emancipated world, where there are no longer dominator and dominated nations and, eventually, no longer any borders whatsoever.

** The Greens promise to "end police brutality and mass incarceration" by creating "a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to understand and eliminate the legacy of slavery."

Are they fucking kidding? How did any of the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commissions ever CHANGE anything for the masses of people? Look at South Africa. Despite some cosmetic changes and different faces at the top of the heap, the racialized poverty is still grinding, the barbaric racial caste system is still enforced, and the hopes of millions have been crushed.

The police terrorizing, brutalizing, and murdering Black and Brown people in cold blood is not some kind of "mistake." This is the police playing the role they are supposed to play—enforcing a system that was built on white supremacy and has always used grotesque violence to back that up AND which, in this globalized era, can no longer profitably exploit millions of Black people—so it has penned Black and Latino people into ghettos, set people up against each other, and outright kills them off on top of it all.

Fuck another commission. The ONLY way to end this is by overthrowing this system, dismantling its police forces, and building a whole new economy and society that is digging up exploitation and white supremacy. You need organs of state power that are going to back up the masses in transforming ALL relations of exploitation and oppression, and you need leadership committed to that, and in this putrid and racist society the liberation of Black people must be at the heart of that.

We need revolution, not reconciliation!

** The Greens promise "living-wage jobs for every American who needs work, replacing unemployment offices with employment offices."

Let's play this fantasy out: Say the Greens somehow forced American companies to start hiring the millions of Americans who are looking for work at a living wage. Instead of paying immigrants a few dollars an hour to pick crops in the fields, or children a few dollars a day to sew clothes in Bangladesh, these corporations would be forced to pay $15 or more an hour to Americans. These American companies—who are in intense competition with others around the world—would be forced to sell their products at a loss to pay for those wages. In that mad rush of competition, the capital that is currently concentrated in America would pull out and seek out more profit elsewhere. The entire financial base in the U.S., which has grown so wealthy through all this international exploitation, would disintegrate. And then where would the resources come from to employ all these people?

Constitution, On the Possibility, Statement on Strategy
Read the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America online

Read On the Strategy for Revolution

Read On the Possibility of Revolution

An Answer Based on Reality

Ending any of these howling outrages requires something much deeper than simply redistributing the wealth accumulated through global imperialist plunder and exploitation. It requires OVERTHROWING this system, seizing control of the productive forces of society, and digging up all the forms of exploitation through which that wealth is produced. It requires recasting those productive powers to support revolutionary transformation worldwide, meet the material needs of the people, and mend, protect, and enhance the ecosystems of our planet. It requires a new revolutionary state power and revolutionary leadership that gives backing to the people to wage massive social and political struggle to uproot and overturn all the deep social divisions and oppression that have been woven into this system of capitalist exploitation: white supremacy, patriarchy, and more.

The Greens don't have a program to do this, but the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, does.

The Revolutionary Communist Party is organizing now to overthrow this system at the soonest possible time. It is preparing to lead an actual revolution to bring about a radically new and better society: see the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. It is doing this based on the scientific approach and strategy developed by Bob Avakian, the Karl Marx of our time. Bob Avakian has developed a new synthesis of communism and is actively leading the fight not to redistribute the spoils of this empire, but to bring about a world free of empire—a world in which all seven billion are emancipated.

There is no shortcut to a society on the road to human emancipation. There is no way to meet the people's needs by playing within their rules and within the framework of the Capitalist-Imperialist System. There is no painless way to get there, no way to wield the instruments given you by this ruling class when they possess the bottom-line monopoly on force. But revolution is possible and there is a way to fight and a real chance to win.

This is a harder road. But it is far more realistic—and far, far more liberating. Get into it and get with it today. Engage with the work of Bob Avakian, and form your own opinion. Go to revcom.us. Join the Revolution Club. As you do—and as part of preparing for and hastening this revolution—join in waging powerful, mass independent political resistance against this system's crimes that breaks out of their official and meaningless electoral channels. This is the only way anything meaningful has ever been won.

Also see: The Deadly Logic of the Lesser Evil

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