A Letter to the Revolution Clubs

Thoughts on the Battle to Drive Out the Trump/Pence Fascist Regime

October 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The film of Bob Avakian’s new speech addresses the most urgent question of the day: how to understand, and what to do about, the threat to humanity itself posed by the Trump/Pence regime. This talk—from the most radical revolutionary on the planet—makes the case for massive, sustained nonviolent outpourings to begin on November 4 in a compelling way. It traces the roots of the regime—the deeper and more immediate causes of its rise to power. This hour-long speech is full of substance, and heart.

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Click here to read—and spread—the Call for Nov 4.

Bringing Foward Another Way is an edited version of a talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, to a group of Party supporters, in 2006. It is must reading for a serious understanding of what the U.S. "war on terror" is really about and how to bring forward a positive force in the world in opposition to both Western imperialism and Islamic Jihad.

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We’re now heading to November 4, the first day of massive, nonviolent, sustained, and determined actions to drive out the fascist regime of Trump and Pence. This letter isn’t going to repeat everything in Bob Avakian’s new speech or the many documents from Refuse Fascism or articles on this site about WHY this is so urgent. It’s gonna focus instead on what the clubs should be doing, based on that understanding.

One key part of this movement must be a section of the basic people who catch hell every day, especially the youth. This section of the people, with revolution at their core, can provide a political backbone to the movement and a moral challenge to the rest of society. Something like this was done by the Black Panther Party in relation to the antiwar movement back in the ’60s.

There are plenty of people in places like Chicago, or LA, who on some level get the nature of the threat posed by Trump and there are broad masses who just plain hate him. There are youth who want a better world and who need to be brought into motion on this. There are immigrant youth up against the threat of deportation; Black youth being demonized and worse; and all kinds of youth of all nationalities who just can’t stand this nightmare.

The understanding of the Revolution Club is this: We are for revolution, all-the-way revolution, to get rid of this capitalist-imperialist, white supremacist society. We have the science, the leadership, the vision of the new society, and the strategy to make that happen. Right now, that revolution has to go through the stage of getting rid of Trump. This is urgent—this is urgent for the masses and for whether we are even going to be able to mount a larger struggle.

The clubs can take that understanding to the people. The most critical way will be “leading with BA” and especially the new filmed talk, THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America: A Better World IS Possible. The clubs should be showing it all over—in classrooms, community centers, and on the street. The clubs should be about leading people to help make this film big on social media. Plus there’s the indictments, which are really important because most people don’t know the full scope of what this regime is doing. And there is the basic call, which must be postered all over. NO! shirts must become the thing.

We MUST draw out the youth—the students in high school and college, and the basic youth who are in the life, or drifting. This means a LOT of mass work in these next few weeks in the base. And that has to mean giving people a mission: a mission to play a critical role in driving out this regime. Everybody we meet who is in the least supportive should walk away with something to do—from setting up a showing to getting their friends together to putting on the NO! shirt or taking cards or stickers to distribute... and a way to report back. The club should be raising money as it goes, all the time, and other people raising money too can be one big way that they contribute to the whole thing happening. If there’s an office, older folks can run it and be there to keep track of things politically and give people stuff to get out. And there can be daily meetings of an hour or two to sum up what’s been done and what needs to be done, and to go more deeply into questions.

Let the clubs be all over in the next few weeks. Let them go boldly onto the campuses—both the universities (including community colleges) AND DEFINITELY the high schools; let them do pop-up rallies in key neighborhoods, focused on open-air showings of the talk; let them reach out to people we know who are links into the youth (people who work with victimized women, or “at risk” young people, or with the gangs, etc.) to make the case to the youth they work with (and to others like them who do similar work). Let the clubs reach out to all kinds of forces (student groups, DACA and other immigrant groupings, forces around Black Lives Matter or similar groups, NGO forces, religious youth groups, truce activists, etc.). This is not about “our group” or “your group”—this is about an emergency.

The club should dream big and aim high, but fight to forge the ties and organize to make things happen. Think about—and fight for—walkouts from high schools and even jobs, leaving the corners, demos on campuses and leaving classes... moving to massive and growing outpourings in the late afternoon and evenings through the week of November 6 and beyond...

In regard to Chicago in particular, think of the potential national and international impact if there were an element of defying the regime’s attempt to constantly demonize the youth of Chicago. Instead of the world constantly seeing Trump and them using the conflicts among the masses to justify their genocidal plans, how about the world hearing that “we here in Chicago, including the ones of us cast out on the bottom, are bringing forward something in opposition to this madness, and for a whole better world.”

Communists in the club need to be bringing out how all this fits into a strategy—that the revolution has to go through this stage right now, and how this stage fits into the revolution, and even more—what that revolution is all about. Communists should be giving people running with the club a sense that we are applying the two maximizings ¹ and that this is part of the strategy to “break the encirclement” (the political encirclement in this period) and has relevance as well to how we conceive of state power.

Even more, communists need to bring out the whole picture of communism, as they are meeting people and running with them and focusing things on driving out the Trump/Pence regime. REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!; THE NEW COMMUNISM; Science and Revolution, the interview with Ardea Skybreak; and the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America... as well as BAsics... all this should be wielded by club members. The Points of Attention should still be going up everywhere, with people in the club living by that morality. The REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! T-shirts should be worn and gotten out, and the club should still post up when the police come down. But there has to be something different too—that we are doing all this with the immediate aim of politically driving out this Trump/Pence regime, and that this is the principal task and focus of club activity for the next period.

The point is this: we must mobilize a crucial section of masses to play their full part in changing the course of history, in the interests of humanity.

1. In his 2006 talk Bringing Forward Another Way, Bob Avakian says about the “two maximizings”:

Moving ahead then from that foundation, I want to talk a little bit about the “two maximizings” and the decisive role overall of the first. To very quickly paraphrase here, this (“two maximizings”) refers to developing a politicized atmosphere and a revolutionary current—and in particular a growing pole of people partisan to communism and to the Party—among the proletariat and basic masses; and developing essentially the same thing among the middle strata. And then there is the need to develop the “positive synergy” between these “two maximizings”; or, to put it another way (in more “classical communist terms”), the dialectical relation—the mutual interaction and reinforcement—between the two, in a positive way. [back]

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