From a member of the Revolution Club at UCLA
Why people should read and spread “The Truth About Right-Wing Conspiracy… And Why Clinton and the Democrats Are No Answer” from Bob Avakian
March 1, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
I tell everyone I talk to to read “The Truth About Right-Wing Conspiracy… And Why Clinton and the Democrats Are No Answer” from Bob Avakian because it does a really good job of explaining why we’re in the situation we’re in, which is a big question people are up against: why is this happening? I think everyone needs to engage this piece because even as we’re uniting together from all kinds of different perspectives to oust this regime, people have to come to learn that this is coming from the same system of capitalism, that we can understand it, and that combating this fascist regime requires resistance on terms that are in the interests of humanity, not the terms set by the Democrats (which lead people to ultimately accept this, and which don’t even recognize or admit that it is fascism).
This piece from Bob Avakian really gives people a sense of the material basis for fascism to be implemented right now. This is something that is missing in people’s understanding. What fascism is and that it’s a leap to a different form of rule. People are missing the understanding of the necessity that the ruling class is facing. And this could lead to people missing out on really big questions. For example, the contradictions of imperialism and how they see their necessity in terms of ISIS.
It also draws from all different sources and really paints a picture of their agenda. What they are actually after?
Before I read it, I didn’t have a sense of the history of how the fascists were dealing with Bill Clinton. I didn’t know anything about Clinton and what he represented. I was surprised to find out how much they were going after him even though he was the most conservative Democrat up to that point. Some of the things that were used against him were policies that he himself was putting forward. BA does a really good job of explaining why that is. Why even though he seems to have a lot of unity with the fascists, there is still that element that BA talks about in “The Fascists and the Destruction of the ‘Weimar Republic’... And What Will Replace It.” That in order to implement fascism, you have to go after bourgeois democracy.
The main thing I came to understand is that it’s not the conflicts floating up in the air but rooted in how the sections of the bourgeoisie see their necessity. Problems they are trying to solve, from the perspective of cohering and advancing their empire, and differences over how to solve those problems.
The direction is similar in that, at this time in the world, capitalism needs to become more repressive given the development of the economic situation internationally to the point where you don’t have freedom to have all these social programs like the New Deal. It helps understand the material basis for the rise of fascism and why Clinton was such a conservative Democrat. And it sets a foundation to understand the conflicts in the ruling class. What terrain is that happening on?
You get this stuff all throughout society of just calling these fascists crazy or making psychiatric evaluations because people don’t understand the reasoning behind their actions. Or some people just think it’s all to make profit, really narrowly understood. If you don’t understand the real deeper reasons for this, you’re not going to understand how this is connected to the necessity they’re facing around the world: with Islamic fundamentalism, how the slow genocide against Black people can speed up to a fast one... or the struggle around abortion. How they see the potential unraveling of the social fabric of America because of the rise of diversity and multiculturalism. Fascism isn’t just some crazy matter of preference but how they see dealing with the deeper problems they’re facing.
People don’t go there and part of problem with that is they don’t see how serious this is. How they’ve been working for decades to implement this fascist program and the material basis in the laws, flowing out of the deeper dynamics economically and politically. But there is a material basis for them to do what they say they’re going to do.
It makes a difference in whether people understand this as a whole fascist program with momentum and a material basis vs. these people are just crazy and going after people’s rights or going after particular groups of people that they hate but not seeing the reasoning behind that other than prejudice.
Also, the article explains that the Democrats have a lot of unity with the fascists and how these fascists are actually taken seriously, that the fascists are seen by the Democrats as a legitimate voice in the discussion about how to solve these problems. It gives you an understanding of why you can’t rely on the Democrats to solve this. And why, along with taking back the political initiative, we have to be challenging the fascist morality. BA gives the example of abortion and what it has meant that the Democrats have given the moral high ground to the fascists by saying abortion should be “safe, legal but rare” instead of “abortion on demand and without apology.” Those are the terms that have been set and have confused so many people, and we have to change those terms. This is not about babies but about whether women are going to be treated as full human beings. Similar with internationalism and how people are being trained to think in terms of America first and American lives are more important than other people’s lives.
You can see sparks of opposition to that in the airport protests, but we really have to bring people that internationalist orientation. I keep thinking about the sentence in the new Call to Action from Refuse Fascism: “It might only take a single serious crisis—international or domestic—for this regime to drop the hammer. We do not have much time.”
We could be one attack away from them dropping the hammer. So if people don’t have the right orientation when something like that happens, you can see how people might be scared into submission. And they’ve already been influenced by the idea of America first by the fascists and even the Democrats. Look at what Bernie Sanders cohered people around, even in a more “progressive” way.
The more general thing I came to appreciate a lot more from BA’s article is the need for people to be able to analyze society in a scientific way. If you’re not understanding where things are coming from, you will be led to all kinds of different directions and all kinds of non-solutions and people won’t fight in a way that is commensurate to what we’re dealing with. That’s too much of what we’re seeing now.
Again, even as we’re uniting together from all kinds of different perspectives to oust this regime, people have to come to learn that this is coming from the same system of capitalism, that we can understand it, and that combating this fascist regime requires resistance on terms that are in the interests of humanity, not the terms set by the Democrats (which lead people to ultimately accept this, and which don’t even recognize or admit that it is fascism).
And for those who recognize that America was NEVER great and who through the process of this are looking for answers. For those who do not want to settle for bourgeois democracy with all its “softer” horrors, they have to know that this system has no solution to the problems that plague humanity; and the only way to deal with the contradictions faced by the ruling class in a way that is in the interests of humanity is to make a revolution and to bring into being the society envisioned in the CONSTITUTION For The New Socialist Republic In North America authored by Bob Avakian. There’s a way to really understand the world in all its complexity, a whole other way the world can be, and a strategy for how to get there.
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.