This Week...this Issue

June 3, 2019 | revcom.us

 

This was another week marked by insane and unnecessary cruelty. The U.S. took more than 900 of the refugees captured at the Mexican border and imprisoned them in a space designed for 100 people. They instituted further cruel cuts in abortion rights, with more and more women forced to bear children against their will. Furious trade wars and threats of trade wars with China and Mexico, arms sales to push forward genocide in the country of Yemen. The administration banned all agencies from making any projections whatsoever about the likely or possible courses of climate change that go beyond the year 2040. Trump threatened and defied the Democrats, and the Democratic leadership did... nothing.

Don’t let the steadiness of the drumbeat harden you to the intensification of the horror. MAGA is not merely a stupidly simple campaign slogan, though it is that. It is a fascist rallying cry, a call to reassert the interlocking triad of oppression that supposedly “made America great”—white supremacy, male supremacy, and crude America-first chauvinism—to justify U.S. murder and extortion around the world. These attacks are not just “going back to the past,” nor are they part of some mythical “pendulum swing.”

It is not that the regime is going to restore these forms of oppression—in fact, those horrors never went away, no matter who has held the White House. No, this regime is on track to intensify these outrages to a level that today may seem unimaginable to you—and indeed is doing so as you read this. This is because what has served this empire for decades is now fraying and in crisis, and sections of this country’s rulers feel they require desperate measures to continue to stay atop and enforce this capitalist-imperialist system. The Trump/Pence regime is a particularly putrid expression of this system, not an aberration.

And Trump is not just some dangerously moronic madman in the White House, though he is that. He is an effective demagogue who heads and coheres a fascist movement: a movement that is in power and taking things in a very definite direction. They have packed the courts. They were caught this week rigging the census to try to cut down on the votes and voting impact of Black people, Latinos, immigrants, and other non-white people. Trump has openly said that if things go against him, he will rely on his support among the police, the military, and “bikers for Trump.” The fascist movement he heads, in and out of power, openly threatens civil war.

This is not going to be stopped with votes. This is not even going to be stopped with calls for impeachment, while people sit on their asses. Fifty years of voting and “working within the system” have gotten us here: up against a fascist regime locking down an even more horrific future... if indeed there is even to be a future for humanity. This system has shown you that it has no answers to what is going on today, that it cannot accommodate even the reforms made in the 1960s—reforms that have been under attack ever since.

The revolution DOES have answers and it has radical ways for you to act as you are getting into those answers and learning more. This week we are focusing on:

• the National Revolution Tour and its upcoming Revolution—Nothing Less! weekend in Los Angeles;
• the attacks on abortion and the resistance this Tour has called for, as part of building for that revolution (a call which has been joined with by Refuse Fascism, whose mission is to drive out the Trump/Pence regime with massive, nonviolent struggle);
• the true history of the Los Angeles Police Department, which will be celebrating 150 years of piggery, torture, murder, repression, and racism on the very day and at the very place in which the Revolution Tour will send a powerful message to the world.

Grounding all of this are the words and works of Bob Avakian. Especially for this week, listen to the excerpt from BA’s answer to a question on the role for newer people in this movement, from the speech he gave last summer, Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution; and the excerpt from Ardea Skybreak’s book Science and Revolution, “Leadership: Does It Stifle or Unleash Initiative?”