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A New Theoretical Framework for a New Stage of Communist Revolution
Excerpt from the Interview with Ardea Skybreak
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In the early part of this year (2015), over a number of days, Revolutionconducted a wide-ranging interview with Ardea Skybreak. A scientist with professional training in ecology and evolutionary biology, and an advocate of the new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian, Skybreak is the author of, among other works,The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters, and Of Primeval Steps and Future Leaps, An Essay on the Emergence of Human Beings, the Source of Women’s Oppression, and the Road to Emancipation. An excerpt from this interview, “On Attending the Dialogue Between Bob Avakian and Cornel West,” was first published in February 2015. In March 2015 two additional excerpts were published ("An Explorer, a Critical Thinker, a Follower of BA: Understanding the World, And Changing It For the Better, In the Interests of Humanity" and "Some Thank Yous That Need To Be Said Aloud"). This is another excerpt from this interview. The text of the complete interview is available as a book from Insight Press. A PDF of the complete interview (including a Table of Contents, with links to the different sections of the interview) is also available.
Q: OK. So I thought we could kind of broaden it out now from talking about the Dialogue. But just before we do, I want to echo what you were saying about how people should really go to the website revcom.us and check out the Dialogue and really take it in, and check out the film of the Dialogue once it is available. I think your phrase about how there was magic in the air is a really appropriate phrase to describe it. So I want to echo your urging people to do that. But just to kind of broaden it out, I was wondering if you could speak in a more overall way about how you see the content and significance of Bob Avakian’s work, method and leadership. What is the significance of this in the world? And how this relates to the points that we’ve been talking about in terms of a scientific approach to understanding and changing the world through revolution.
AS: Well, I think we’re talking about the most advanced revolutionary theoretician alive in the world today, the person who has taken things furthest in terms of the development of the science of revolution which started with Marx in the late 1800s and which was further developed through different periods by Lenin and Mao in particular. As time went on, and at every stage, there were some very significant new things that were learned and applied. There were some important new theoretical developments as well as practical advances. But I really think that Bob Avakian’s work in this period is actually ushering in a new stage of communism. And that’s both for objective reasons and subjective reasons in my opinion. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. First of all, there have been significant new material developments in the world even since the time of Mao, and the theoretical work that BA has done is capable of recognizing, encompassing and addressing those objective changes. The world doesn’t stand still and we don’t live in exactly the same world that Marx lived in, or that Lenin lived in, or even that Mao lived in, so the science of revolution has to remain dynamic and be able to continually develop, including in relation to these ongoing changes in the objective situation. But the reason I think that BA’s work is ushering in a new stage of communism is not just because of ongoing worldwide changes in the objective situation but because of the pathbreaking breakthroughs BA has been making on what we might call the subjective side of the equation—in other words, his whole development of a new synthesis of communism and the radically different method and approach he is taking to the problems of advancing the revolution, both in this country and worldwide, which I feel represent a very significant advance in the development of the science itself and which stand in sharp contrast to the various kinds of wrong-headed methods and approaches which have plagued most of the so-called international communist movement for quite some time now.
BA’s theoretical work has deeply analyzed, sifted through, and recast the experience of the past in a way that is actually bringing forward some new theoretical components that have never been seen before, including in relation to the concrete process of building up revolutionary movements—identifying some of the key and much more consistently scientific methods and principles that must be applied in order to do this correctly (not just here, but in other types of countries as well), the key things that have to be kept in mind all along the road to revolution, leading up to the seizure of power; and bringing forward as well, again in some important new ways, some of the methods and principles that should be applied in the approach to actually seizing power, and to going on from there to build a new socialist society in such a way that it would not only truly constitute a society that most people would want to live in, but also one that would have a better chance than past such societies of not getting diverted and turned backwards, back towards capitalism instead of forward towards communism.
But here’s part of the dilemma, here’s what’s frustrating to me: most people today don’t get any of this! They don’t get the significance, literally on a world scale, of what BA’s new synthesis of communism is opening up, in terms of new possibilities for humanity. People don’t get this unless they actually start digging into these questions a little more seriously and actually start to grapple more scientifically with what’s going on in the world, and what’s actually needed.
Q: Which questions?
AS: Well, once again, the significance of what Bob Avakian has brought forward in relation to objective developments in the world and vis-à-vis some of the very wrong views and problems of method that prevail today among most so-called communists. Again, there was what has been called “the first wave” of socialist revolutions, which lasted up through the late 1970s, when capitalism was restored in China and the world was once again devoid of any genuine socialist societies. Marx really opened up that first stage of things in the late 1800s with his insightful historical materialist theoretical work on class contradictions throughout history and on the particular features of capitalist societies and the need and basis for revolutions to move beyond that towards socialism and communism, ultimately on a global scale. There was, in 1871, the experience of the Paris Commune, which was significant as a preliminary kind of attempt in which proletarian forces seized and briefly held power in Paris, but this really could not be consolidated for any length of time—there was not yet the conception, there was not yet the strategy, there was not yet really a vision, of what needed to happen to take it further. Obviously, the Russian revolution of 1917 was able to not only seize power, but to also consolidate power, and then go on to establish socialism and build the Soviet Union as a socialist state for a number of decades, before it got reversed and capitalism got restored there in the 1950s. And then the Chinese revolution, after the country-wide seizure of power there in 1949, and right up to the late 1970s, was able to take the process even further, before it too got reversed. So it’s important to learn from all this, both from the advances and from the shortcomings.
Lenin, who led the revolution that brought the Soviet Union into being, was a very important theoretician who, among many other important theoretical breakthroughs, developed a real understanding of how capitalism had evolved into imperialism, into a world-wide system. Those were important objective changes in the world at the time, and some of Lenin’s developments of the theory actually encompassed those changes and spoke to them in some very important ways, which I won’t try to get into here. Then, by the time of the Chinese revolution, Mao advanced things yet again, bringing forward a lot of new understanding of things, like how to get started on the revolutionary road in a Third World country dominated by foreign imperialism, and what it meant to actually wage protracted people’s war in that type of country over a period of time, leading up to the country-wide seizure of power. Some of Mao’s greatest contributions were made after the seizure of power, over a period of years, in the course of analyzing the positive and negative experiences of the Soviet Union, and in relation to the challenges encountered while working to develop a socialist society in China. Mao’s theoretical breakthroughs during those years included the analysis—the very important analysis—of what were the social and ideological remnants, the vestiges, of the old society which still exerted significant influence in the new socialist society, and his recognition therefore of the need to find appropriate ways to “continue the revolution” even in a socialist society. This was something new, that had not been previously understood or anticipated, and it marked a critical advance in the developing science of communism—a key lesson for communists to learn, and learn well, not just in China back then but everywhere around the world, and one that will be critical to have in mind in all future socialist societies. As part of all this, Mao developed critically important theoretical concepts about class relations under socialism, including the fact, that he famously popularized, that, in socialist society, “you don’t know where the bourgeoisie is—it’s right inside the communist party!” This is something Mao analyzed at a certain point in the development of socialist society, and he unleashed people to wage a Cultural Revolution, even under socialism, to advance things further. That was very important, and those important leaps and breakthroughs made by Mao have been deeply appreciated and analyzed by BA and have been incorporated into the new synthesis that BA has been developing ever since then. Despite all the major theoretical and practical advances and contributions of Mao and the striking accomplishments achieved in the course of developing socialism in China in the course of just a few decades, the fact that the revolution there did get reversed in the late ‘70s and that capitalism has been restored there was certainly a great impetus to recognizing the need to make rigorous scientific analyses of what had happened there and to develop the scientific theoretical framework of communism even further, in order to be able to handle things even better the next time around. Which is precisely what BA set out to do and the new synthesis of communism he has brought forward is very much the fruit of the work he has done in order to meet that need.
So again today, there are no socialist countries in the world. That doesn’t mean there aren’t revolutionaries or people talking about communism and socialism in different parts of the world, in different countries, even waging people’s war in some places—or people who have done so in more recent decades. But, frankly, the international situation is a mess. The international communist movement is, by and large, a mess. And it’s because of some very, very problematic lines and line differences in the international movement—some very fundamental errors that have been made in either one or another direction, and which BA has spoken to. He’s helping to sort that out. But, to be blunt, he’s basically not appreciated by the bulk of what has been the sort of old-school international communist movement. He’s very controversial in those circles. People disagree with him a lot, because there are these very wrong tendencies and trends in different countries that get away from the revolutionary road and from the path towards genuine socialism and communism but that some individuals and organizations are very invested in holding on to, it seems. And, I mean, some people actually think he doesn’t even have the right to speak about these issues because he’s not from a Third World country, he’s a white guy from an imperialist country. That’s a pitifully narrow and pathetic way of thinking. But it’s rooted not just in narrow nationalism (though that is certainly a factor), but also in the kind of devaluing of science, and of theory in general, that is so prevalent everywhere these days.
On the more positive side, I’d like to point people again to the polemics that have been written by revolutionaries in Mexico, the OCR, which can be accessed through the revcom.us site, and other things that have been written by others, polemicizing against some of these wrong trends in the international communist movement today and upholding BA’s new synthesis of communism in opposition to that. Again, people should go to the online theoretical journal Demarcations, which can also be accessed through revcom.us. These polemics point correctly to the fact that, on the one hand, you have these dogmatic tendencies...I’ll just very briefly say this: On the one hand you have these trends in the international movement that represent dogmatic tendencies, that argue that you only have to rigidly “stick to the fundamentals,” that act as if there’s basically nothing new to learn (!), despite the clear evidence that the world keeps changing in many important ways that need to be taken into account, and despite the fact that there’s obviously a great need to sift through past accumulated experience in order to better learn how to avoid critical setbacks and have more successful revolutions and build more successful socialist societies. Seems kinda obvious, right? But there are more than a few mechanical dogmatic types around the world who approach revolution and communism more as a religion than a science and who therefore won’t even really examine and engage these types of questions. And then there’s the other kind of trend that basically says, “Well, there have been problems in the international communist movement and mistakes made in the past, so we’ve gotta loosen things up and just have a whole lot more elasticity and we’ll be fine”—but basically they’re going in circles and sort of rediscovering bourgeois democracy! They might as well just sign up, sign on the dotted line, to just try to obtain a few more bourgeois democratic freedoms and liberties, while essentially leaving the world as it is! This trend has very little to do with actually breaking away from the capitalist framework in any kind of fundamental sense—it often seems to be trying simply to promote the economic development of Third World countries within that global capitalist framework, and maybe just extract a few more freedoms and liberties, especially for the middle strata in the cities. But none of this is actually taking sufficiently into account the real core contradictions in these countries, the objective changes that have been taking place, and what it is that the broad masses of these countries actually need, in order to really break out of the overwhelmingly oppressive and exploitative framework under which they live.
Look, I realize that in this interview we can’t really get into all this in detail. I more just wanted to make the point that, today, in terms of the international communist movement, well, there really is no single international communist movement. There are revolutionaries and communists in different parts of the world, and, since the loss of socialism in China, to a very large degree they’ve been in disarray. In fact, it was thanks to Bob Avakian that there was even a coherent analysis put forward at the time of the coup in China and the restoration of capitalism. He analyzed what actually had happened there to set things back on the capitalist path. And he helped to forge a deeper understanding of what is the correct way to unfold revolution and socialism in the modern world. But it’s not like everybody decided to stand up and clap and agree with it—it’s been either ignored, or very contended, and it still is, right up to this day. So frankly, it is a big problem in the world that there is not even much serious and substantial engagement and wrangling with the theoretical developments of the science of communism represented by BA’s new synthesis. And it would be better if there were more unity forged on that developing foundation and basis.
Q: So, a big part of what you are saying is that the work that Avakian has done has actually carved out a new theoretical framework for a new stage of communist revolution, has actually advanced the science of revolution.
AS: That’s exactly what I’m saying. And I think how much it’s needed, both in this country and internationally, is pretty clear, given what is actually happening to the world and to the people of the world, and how much revolutionary change is needed. But there’s so much confusion and disarray. And there are people...look, there have been attempts at developing revolutions in recent decades in Peru and Nepal, to take two salient examples. In both those cases there were some very dedicated people who made great sacrifices and fought for years to try to have revolutions in those countries, but they have gone completely off track. And the thing is, it didn’t have to end up that way...I’m not saying that there could have been any guarantees that they would stay on track, and revolutionaries did face some very difficult conditions in both those countries. There were a lot of challenging problems that needed to be solved for those revolutions to have a chance of being successful. But the point is that there was a lot of unnecessary resistance to digging into some of the critical theoretical struggles that needed to be waged, to try to actually bring light into, shine a light onto some of the problems that were being encountered by the revolutionary struggles as the conditions in the world were changing—the conditions of the cities in the Third World, the conditions of the countryside in the Third World. For instance, the whole question of the application of solid core, with lots of elasticity based on the solid core, to those particular situations, in those types of countries, would have been extremely relevant to explore. But that kind of overarching principle is neither well understood nor even much examined or reflected on by revolutionaries in different parts of the world these days. Instead, as I was saying earlier, what you find are either tendencies towards going in the direction of brittle dogmatism and being static, stiff and controlling in a bad way; or tendencies towards throwing everything out the window by being too loose, including trying to pander to the middle strata of some of those countries and their interests–essentially advocating for what looks a whole lot like bourgeois democracy. Even if you give it the name socialism or communism, that’s not what it is.
So there’s a need for a whole world-wide engagement with some of these things. I really do believe, from my scientific perspective, that what Avakian has done is...he has really developed...on a number of key questions, he has really developed some very new thinking: about the road to revolution, about the seizure of power, about the nature of the new society that should be built up. In all of these dimensions he has carved out some very new thinking, identified some warning signs and problems to be avoided, and in particular he’s done this by highlighting the typical philosophical and methodological errors that people tend to fall into, and by drawing out the implications of the fact that if you don’t approach things with the right methods, there’s no way you are going to be able to bring about some truly positive advances. He’s shown this, and he’s brought out lots of concrete evidence of this, and he’s drawn on lots of historical examples to reveal patterns and show where these errors of method can lead.
In any field of science, whenever you have people who are bringing forward genuinely new thinking and really visionary analyses and syntheses, and who are critiquing old ways of thinking, old methods, old ways of approaching things, it’s unfortunately often the case that, for a while at least, their work is not understood, is mocked, and reviled, or simply ignored. The history of science–all science–is full of examples of this. And it’s a shame really...it constitutes a loss for humanity. In my view, every minute that goes by where Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism is not being seriously engaged and grappled with is another minute lost in the struggle to emancipate humanity from the horrors of this capitalist-imperialist world.
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In the early part of this year (2015), over a number of days, Revolutionconducted a wide-ranging interview with Ardea Skybreak. A scientist with professional training in ecology and evolutionary biology, and an advocate of the new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian, Skybreak is the author of, among other works,The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters, and Of Primeval Steps and Future Leaps, An Essay on the Emergence of Human Beings, the Source of Women’s Oppression, and the Road to Emancipation. An excerpt from this interview, “On Attending the Dialogue Between Bob Avakian and Cornel West,” was first published in February 2015. In March 2015 two additional excerpts were published ("An Explorer, a Critical Thinker, a Follower of BA: Understanding the World, And Changing It For the Better, In the Interests of Humanity" and "Some Thank Yous That Need To Be Said Aloud"). This is another excerpt from this interview. The text of the complete interview is available as a book from Insight Press. A PDF of the complete interview (including a Table of Contents, with links to the different sections of the interview) is also available.
Q: Yeah, I think what you just said is a really important, a really provocative and powerful point. And I want to continue with that thread. In this interview so far, you’ve been talking about the new synthesis of communism that BA has brought forward, and to get a little bit more into this: What does it mean to say that there is a new synthesis of communism? Or another way to go at this is, what’s new about it?
AS: Well, that’s a very big question, obviously, which I can’t do justice to in a limited interview like this. I would first of all point people again to the website revcom.us, where, if you go to the BA portal and you click on it, not only are some of the key works of BA in recent times featured there, but there’s also a complete bibliography of core works, and you can actually access for free a whole lot of very important works by BA. He’s making these very broadly available and facilitating that process. And, on that website, there are some explanations of what the new synthesis is, a brief explanation, and also some longer explanations. I think BA and the Party are making a lot of efforts to try to give this to the people, to anyone who is interested, making it available very broadly and encouraging people to check it out, making things either free or very inexpensive, trying to really make it easy for people to get into it. There are many different works, and I think it’s important that people actually read BA’s works. There are many books and articles and essays. There are many talks, there are films of his talks, and you can get a better sense there than what I can possibly represent here.
But I will say that some of what’s new about the new synthesis of communism is, first of all, that it’s much more scientific than anything that’s come before. You can see this, and we talked about some of this earlier, in the ways it approaches really digging into material reality as it actually is, uncovering patterns, using scientific methods to investigate and explore ever more deeply, being willing to go to some uncomfortable places, really promoting critical thinking, being willing to look into some of the errors of the past in order to learn from them and go forward on a better basis. Look, one of the things the new synthesis has done is that it hasn’t just limited itself to sorting out and distinguishing the positives and what was correct in the past experience of socialist revolutions, from the negatives and the errors that were made. It has done that, but it’s done a lot more than that. It’s not just some kind of cobbling together of these things. It’s not just a deeper and more scientific analysis of the past, it’s a new synthesis, one that is based on that deeper analysis, of how to better go forward in making revolution and building a new socialist society on a better foundation and with better methods than at any time in the past. It’s actually breaking new ground in terms of sorting out and recasting the experience of the earlier wave of socialist revolution, basically from the 19th century and Marx’s early development, up through the reversal of the Chinese revolution in the 1970s. Again, that’s what is meant by “the first wave,” and there’s been a lot of deep analysis of what was correct in all these different experiences, what does or doesn’t help things move forward in the direction of communism, what is actually, objectively, in the interest of the vast majority of humanity. The new synthesis has deepened our understanding of internationalism, with the concept that the whole world comes first and is the fundamental basis and stage on which all these different contradictions are playing out. It has more deeply analyzed the nature of the capitalist-imperialist system, including as it has evolved into further developed empire and has further consolidated its rule over the entire globe.
And the new synthesis has made a deeper and more correct analysis of what does it mean to meet the needs of society, to meet the needs of humanity—what I was saying earlier about going beyond strictly trying to deal with the most basic economic needs. In other words, capitalism-imperialism does exploit the working people for profit, and so on, and there is a struggle to meet the basic requirements of life; but with the new synthesis there is a greater understanding that the world we need, in order to meet the needs of humanity, has to encompass a lot more than that. It needs to meet basic economic needs, but it also has to meet the cultural needs, the scientific and artistic needs, of people broadly and in all their diversity. It obviously needs to be able to encompass and meet the needs of the most oppressed and exploited, but it needs to do even more than that. It needs to encompass very broad swaths of humanity, in all its variations and diversity. So there’s been quite a bit of development in terms of a better understanding of both the nature of the problem and the nature of the necessary solutions, if you want to put it that way.
Again, a hallmark of the new synthesis is that, compared to any previous theoretical development of the science of communism, it is much more thoroughly and consistently scientific in its method and approach to everything. It puts a lot of emphasis on critical thinking and on really boldly confronting errors and shortcomings, while not denying or throwing away the actual successes and accomplishments of previous incarnations of the socialist revolution. And that’s very important. It gets back to what we were talking about in terms of truth and the understanding of what truth is. What is true is what actually corresponds to material reality. That’s what truth is. It’s not just an idea, it’s not just what you might think or what I might think. Does something correspond to the way things actually are in material reality, or does it not? What does the evidence show? You often have to be willing to dig, to explore more deeply, to uncover the evidence and get at the patterns. You generally can’t just answer a question like that in two seconds. You have to be willing to look for patterns and concrete evidence that actually exist in reality. You also have to look for evidence over a period of time: You want to examine repeated examples, not just one example. You don’t just want to go on very partial or limited experience, you don’t just want to say, “Oh, well, this happened the other day, so obviously that’s truth, or obviously that’s a significant thing.” Well, I don’t know. Is it part of a recurrent pattern, or is it just something that occurs every now and then? I mean, what is the actual significance? You have to dig more deeply to get at the bigger lessons of life and the bigger patterns of reality. And one of the things that Avakian has done is to actually promote that kind of method. He basically tells people: Look, no matter how much you might want a better world and no matter how much you might want revolution, and you might want communism, you just can’t try to twist things to fit your expectations or come out the way you’d like them to. You have to actually look for the truth of things, based on concrete evidence, even if it turns out to be an uncomfortable or inconvenient truth, and even if it ends up revealing your own errors or shortcomings. If you really want to go in the right direction, you have to be able to face up to that.
And one of the things that really distinguishes a good scientist—and I would include BA in this category—is this understanding I pointed to before, that you learn at least as much from an analysis of mistakes and shortcomings as from an analysis of successes. And again, one of the things that BA has done is dig deeply into the experience of the first wave of socialist revolution to understand where people, even the best-intentioned people, went off track, made mistakes, had the wrong conceptions or the wrong methods and approaches. And by digging into what actually happened—including some of the errors of method and approach—it becomes a lot more possible to understand what were some of the underlying causes of the restoration of capitalism, why socialism was overthrown and capitalism restored in the Soviet Union and later in China. It becomes much less mystifying or confusing. People sometimes say, “Well, if socialism was so great, how come it got overthrown, how come people didn’t want to keep it?” Well, we now know there were mistakes made, and we can learn from those mistakes. But we also understand better now that one of the big problems of socialist revolution is that you make that revolution in particular countries at particular times, but meanwhile the rest of the world is still wrapped up in capitalism and imperialism; so, for a while at least, any emerging socialist country starts off embedded in an imperialist world, and this generates a lot of pressure and makes it objectively even more difficult to develop the new socialist society. That’s one of the problems people have to wrangle with.
And mistakes have in fact been made in the past when trying to defend socialist societies while also contributing to expanding the world revolution, and when trying to develop the internal socialist life of a society while at the same time having to contend with all those capitalist-imperialist forces pressing in on them, antagonistically, from the outside. These are big complicated problems to have to deal with. And yes, there have been errors of method in how some of that has been dealt with in the past. For instance, there were some errors made in terms of sometimes making unconscionable alliances with repressive foreign regimes in a misguided attempt to defend new and fragile socialist societies by finessing certain international relations or exacerbating some international contradictions between competing imperialists. There were also sometimes errors of method that were made when dealing with some of the middle strata people who may have had one foot in the new society and one foot kind of back in the old society: Sometimes such forces were given too much room to exert their undermining influence, and sometimes they were given too little room to breathe and were restricted too severely.
I don’t feel I can get into all this in great depth right now, but the point is that leading communist revolutions and developing socialist societies on a correct basis is a tremendous challenge, full of complexity and a great many thorny contradictions, which in an overall sense have to be handled “with just the right touch,” or things can easily go off track in some very bad directions. In my opinion the new synthesis, if it is systematically applied to such problems, provides the methods and means to unfold the revolutionary process—both before and after the seizure of power—in a much better way than at any time in the past. It really has broken new ground in terms of the process of getting to the seizure of power, in terms of developing strategy for revolution in a country like the U.S., and also in other types of countries. What are some of the key principles for getting there? What about the question of how to go about actually seizing power when conditions are ripe for this? Seizing power in an actual revolution means going up against the armed force of the state. How could you possibly do that without getting crushed? How do you do that while involving millions of people, and in a country like the U.S.? How do you do it with a realistic chance of winning? You can’t just wish for it to turn out alright (!)...that’s one of the big obstacles...when it comes to that stage of struggle, you’re going up against very powerful forces with entrenched traditions and lots of armaments. How do you develop the work, theoretically and in terms of strategic orientation and approach, so that, when it gets to that point, people have a chance of actually winning and coming out the other end, not just having experienced a lot of loss, but with a new and better society being born and on the way to being developed?
And then there’s the question of how do you nurture this new society in a way that actually moves in the direction of overcoming the “4 Alls” very concretely, in other words, going in the direction of communism. And, at the same time, do it in the way we talked about before—solid core with lots of elasticity based on the solid core. If you’re too elastic, you’re going to get overthrown. All these different forces of basically the old capitalist guard, as well as some newly arising capitalist-inclined forces within socialist society itself, are still going to find a lot of material basis to restore capitalist modes of production and capitalist values, if you’re too loose and don’t prevent that from happening. On the other hand, if you try to control everything too tightly, people broadly are going to feel like they can’t breathe and things are going to chafe and grind.
Innovations are going to be stifled and people are not going to want to take a lot of initiative. There’s going to be fear, there won’t be enough ease of mind, and things will feel repressive even when they’re not, and people just won’t be very motivated to fight for this new society. So you have to get the right synthesis.
I think Avakian is breaking radical new ground on the relationship between these two aspects. There’s the analogy I used earlier about riding a horse, and the two kinds of mistakes you can make: You can let the reins go too loosely and the horse will run away with you, and you’ll probably get thrown off the horse that way; or, you can hold the reins in too tightly but then the horse can’t even run, and nothing positive gets developed, if you follow the analogy.
So these advances, these breakthroughs in the new synthesis, are rooted very fundamentally in a rigorously scientific approach to questions of philosophy and method, applied to meeting the complex needs of humanity in the very best ways possible. Once again, in relation to the question of truth, are you going to think something is true just because that’s what you’re hoping it will be? Are you going to start lying to yourself and convince yourself of something that’s not true, just because it might be more comfortable or convenient? Are you going to try to make reality fit your conceptions, or preconceptions, or are you going to take up scientific methods to get a more accurate picture of how reality really is? Are you going to look for immediate results in the short-term but not bother thinking about strategic objectives and how best to proceed, even now, and at any given moment, in such a way as to advance towards those overall objectives?
November 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Carl Dix is co-initiator of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network and #RiseUpOctober, and a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
Everybody must support the actions of the students at the University of Missouri who have stood up and said NO MORE to the unrelenting string of racist outrages they have been forced to endure on their campus. The actions of #ConcernedStudent1950, the courageous hunger striker Jonathan Butler, and the extraordinary and bold stand taken by the football players are things that we all need to support and learn from. All this indicates that there is a new generation that is not going to take the racism constantly hammered on people by this white supremacist society, that they are willing to put things on the line to stop it, and that when this kind of bold stand is taken it attracts, and compels, others to support it and also step into the fight. This is a very important moment in relation to the struggle throughout the society against the oppression of Black people and other oppressed peoples, and it is part of focusing the thinking of millions to what is fundamental in this society.
The resignations of University president Timothy Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin represent a great victory, one which should be celebrated and built off of. As the struggle goes forward, people should ask themselves and ask all of society, “What kind of a system breeds, supports and defends the kind of racism that the Black students at Missouri—as well as students at every college—have to face? Racism that finds expression in millions of other ways in this society? And what do we intend to do about it?”
The question must be posed to everyone throughout society: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
The outrages endured by Black students on campuses across this country are not “isolated.” They are linked to the slow genocide of mass incarceration, the locking in cages of millions of our youth and the relentless terror and illegitimate violence inflicted on them by police day after day, year after year. Unarmed Black and Brown people being tased to death, beaten to death, choked to death, shot in the back... and over and over again the courts and the media back up the killers and the police walk free. The long and bloody history of slavery, the equally bloody history of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-mob terror, and now the genocidal assault of mass incarceration and police terror: these are all forms of the white supremacy that has been built into the fabric of U.S. society from the very beginning.
It is a basic truth that this SYSTEM has no future for Black youth.
And that: We need a whole different system, one in which the oppression of Black people and other oppressed nationalities, as well as all the other outrages of this system—its rampant violence against women and LGBT people, its brutal wars for empire, its destruction of the environment, its war on immigrants—are eliminated. This requires an actual revolution, nothing less! This revolution is real and it is possible, but it won’t be easy, and the way out of this madness is not obvious. Truly getting free, after so many centuries of oppression and horror, requires science and leadership. We have this science. And we have this leadership in Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I call on everybody who has taken part in this struggle and everyone who has been inspired by this struggle—to get with this revolution and to deeply check out the work of Bob Avakian, who has actually shown the way forward on the most critical problems facing the movement for revolution. To learn more on this, people need to go to revcom.us (in print—REVOLUTION newspaper), as well as check out the book BAsics, the DVDs BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, and the Dialogue between Avakian and Cornel West, REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion.
And right now—as part of hastening and preparing for this revolution, as well as taking further the extremely just and broadly felt urgent demand that the racist terror of the police stop now—students and others must go into the streets in a major way on November 22, one year since the murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black child playing with a toy gun who was shot down by a marauding cop in Cleveland. The system has been working to grease the skids to exonerate the cops who murdered Tamir, and this must not be tolerated. We must join those nationwide who will be saying on that day: “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!”
Thru acting on November 22 and thru carrying forward the struggle that has erupted on the Mizzou campus, we will be posing the question to all of society: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Big questions have been—and need to be further—torn open by the ferocious struggle that jumped off at the University of Missouri against racism and spread to other campuses. As Carl Dix, founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and co-initiator of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, posed it in a recent statement, “What kind of a system breeds, supports and defends the kind of racism that the Black students at Missouri—as well as students at every college—have to face? Racism that finds expression in millions of other ways in this society? And what do we intend to do about it?” The urgency to these questions—and the answers that the RevComs were bringing into the situation—was intensified when white racists responded to these righteous protests by threatening to shoot and kill Black people on campus.
On Thursday, November 12, Carl Dix and the RevComs stepped right into the middle of this, connecting with, widening, and transforming the profound level of ferment that has been stirred up. About 15 students, mainly Black, gathered at “Speaker’s Circle” (a “free speech zone” on campus), a small plaza in the middle of a busy campus crossing. Many more were drawn in once he began. Dix saluted the students who had protested, linked the racism on campus with the white supremacy this country was founded on and which takes a concentrated expression today in police terror, and called on people to get into Bob Avakian, the strategy for revolution, and the new synthesis of communism he has brought forward to put an end to the many other crimes of this system once and for all. Other RevComs passed out Carl Dix’s statement (“Which Side Are You On? Statement of Support for University of Missouri Students”) and signed people up to get into the revolution and get involved in mobilizing protests on the upcoming anniversary of the police murder of Tamir Rice.
Many had heard of Tamir Rice, but very few knew the whole story and circumstance of his death and how the police had tackled and arrested Tamir’s sister rather than even allowing her to comfort her brother as he bled to death on the street. Several Black women present each made the point separately that the story made them think of a younger brother or a cousin, boys in their own families who are in danger already simply because of the color of their skin. One had tears in her eyes as she spoke.
"There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.”
BAsics 1:1
Get your free e-book copy of BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakianhere.
Two Black men who had traveled down to Mizzou from Albany, New York, joined with us. One held the bullhorn for several hours and the other helped hold the Stolen Lives banner and at times joined in the agitation. They, too, came because they were inspired by and wanted to support the student struggle and, from their own perspective, linked this with the fight against other forms of oppression. With encouragement, a Black student testified about the fear she has been made to feel due to the racist attacks and threats on campus and her fear for the safety of her younger brother who looks so much like many on the Stolen Lives banner. “Black lives matter,” insisted a young white man. He pledged he would never sit back while other white people say racist shit in front of him, expecting him to laugh along.
All this was very rich and going strong when a viciously hateful white Biblical fascist showed up with his own bullhorn and sign covered in Bible quotes and the words “Obey HIM.” He got right up in the face of women, calling them “sluts” and “whores” and started taunting Black students, accusing them of “sipping gin and juice” and blaming Michael Brown for his own murder and justifying the actions of the police. It was vile and unadulterated woman-hating, racism, and homophobic bigotry, and it was meant to offend and to injure.
Several students told us that the guy is always on campus and that people usually just ignore or laugh at him. But this kind of celebration of oppression is not funny, and shouldn’t be accepted as just the normal backdrop to life.
On this day, however, a group of students surged forward and got in the face of this fascist bigot. At one point, a physical altercation seemed to briefly break out. It is unclear exactly what happened, but when it was over the fascist was whining about allegedly having been hit in the mouth.
Immediately, the whole scene got more intense and the crowd swelled even more. The preacher was screaming that he was “punched by a Black guy.” A progressive white student started screaming that it was absolutely necessary to “denounce the violence” or else “the protests would end up looking bad.” Right wing students dove into the fray, screaming about how “the left silences free speech with violence.”
In the face of this wild scene breaking out in many directions, we fought hard to refocus things back on what is truly important. We made clear: There is no “war on free speech” as the right wing students and much of the media has tried to pretend. And there is no tyranny of violence coming from “the left.” The whole notion is absurd. Here we were just a day after every single Black student on campus had been threatened with death by white people who were intentionally mimicking the language of people who had carried out mass shootings. And here we were holding up a banner of the faces of just a few dozen of the thousands of Black and Brown people who have been murdered by police. This is what there is an epidemic of: white supremacy and racism, including the police systematically killing Black people. This is the subject that has been focused up by the student protests and this is the subject we will not allow to be changed.
Soon, we had drawn most of the crowd away from the Christian fascist to listen to what we were agitating about, but he could still be heard spouting out his hatred behind us, condemning women who get abortions, gloating over the way the police keep getting away with killing Black people, screeching in the most graphic and hateful terms about gay sex, and howling about the alleged evils of socialism and godlessness. All this made it even more necessary, but also easier and more joyful, to get into why it is absolutely necessary for people to get into Bob Avakian’s work and leadership and join the fight for an actual revolution to put an end to all the outrages the fascist was boasting about.
We got into the first quote of Bob Avakian’s BAsics, “There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.” As well as: Fetuses are NOT babies, abortion is NOT murder, women are NOT incubators. We got into the fact that the Bible was written by human beings, not by god, and that those human beings lived in agrarian, slave-owning societies that stoned women to death if they weren’t virgins when they got married and didn’t understand science yet. We backed this up with Bible quotes and challenged people to confront the real world and a morality rooted in that real world and the interests of emancipating humanity. We got into what communist revolution actually is and challenged people to dig into the work of Bob Avakian, who has advanced the science of communism and is providing leadership today so we can finally get free. Everything the fascist said became fodder for a deeper discussion of the need and the way to break all the chains of oppression and ignorance.
Before long, the right wing students got their steam up again and started shouting about the “left’s suppression of free speech.” A woman got in the main right-wing student’s face, calling out his racism as well as insisting that “as a white male he had no right to speak about her reality as a woman or the reality of Black students.” He accused all of us of being afraid of his ideas and unable to take them on, claiming that instead we rely on violent suppression or “discounting him because he’s a white male.” He screamed that everyone deserves the right to speak, even if you don’t like what they have to say. Oppressed people do have the right not to have to listen to reactionary threats and abuse.
Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?
"Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?" is a clip from the film REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion; A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST & BOB AVAKIAN. The film is of the November 2014 historic Dialogue on a question of great importance in today's world between the Revolutionary Christian Cornel West and the Revolutionary Communist Bob Avakian. Watch the entire film here.
While we united firmly with this woman’s anger, we also clarified: The right wing student’s ideas are wrong not because of his “white male identity,” but because they do not correspond to objective reality. They are morally wrong because they are at odds with the interests of humanity as a whole and serve to reinforce a whole system of oppression—indeed his “independent ideas” are backed up by the armed force of the state. There is not an epidemic of suppression of fascist, racist, woman-hating speech in this country. Turn on Fox News. Turn on CNN, for that matter. Take a history class that promotes the LIE that this country was “founded on liberty” (meanwhile, enslaving millions of Africans and whipping, torturing, raping, and savagely driving them). Besides, if this right wing student is really serious about “everyone’s right to speak,” where is his outrage about Tamir Rice’s right to speak, or Sean Bell’s, or any of the other thousands of Black and Brown people who have been murdered by police? We pointed to these people’s faces and more on the Stolen Lives banner. Where is his concern about the right of Black students to speak about and protest racism without receiving death threats and worse? On those things he was silent, proving that his claim about “free speech” is a cover and an excuse to change the subject and we weren’t going to allow it.
And, no, we weren’t “afraid of his ideas” and we wouldn’t discount them because he is a white male. We were perfectly happy to take on his raggedy bullshit with substance, which we proceeded to do in front of an eager and growing crowd. At the same time, we made clear that this is not some airy “battle of ideas” in the abstract—and we challenged the students listening on this, too. The ideas that this reactionary student was spouting, the ideas that encourage and excuse white students and others to “change the subject” when racism comes up and to turn their heads and allow it to keep happening, are ideas that come from and reinforce a society and a system that is currently carrying out a slow genocide against Black people who have been penned into ghettoes in the millions, denied work, routinely terrorized and even murdered by police, degraded and dehumanized in the media, and locked in cages at a rate unrivaled anywhere in the world.
The ideas of the Christian fascist that were shaming women for having sex and spewing the crudest hatred for women for having abortions or birth control are backed up by thousands of years of tradition’s chains and are being given the force of law across this country as abortion clinics are closed, doctors are terrorized, and women are being forced to risk their lives or have children against their will. We are not “afraid of the ideas,” we are recognizing and fighting against and calling on everyone to join the fight against the system of capitalism-imperialism that is enforcing these oppressive ideas on millions and millions of oppressed people here and all around the world. This is why the work and leadership of Bob Avakian is so valuable and important, this is why people need to get into this and join the revolution and this is why—even as people are learning about and figuring out where they stand in relation to that—we need to join together from different perspectives, shoulder-to-shoulder to fight against oppression today.
Throughout all this, one progressive white student kept insisting that we all be quiet and give him a chance to speak, because he “wanted to put forward a position in the middle.” Now that we had re-cohered the crowd, we gave him the space to say his piece. He insisted he was against racism and with the students who rose up, but also insisted that everyone present “denounce the fact that a preacher had just been punched in the mouth.” He said all violence is wrong and if we don’t insist on this we will allow Fox News to distort and discredit this movement.
Every time he followed something positive with the word “but,” one of the other protesters from out of town would interject, “Everything he says after that ‘but’ is going to be bullshit.” He had a point—that this student was trying to find a “middle ground” where there objectively was none. At the same time, we didn’t feel like this guy should be condemned in the same way as the fascists and reactionaries.
When he was done, I openly refused to denounce anyone for allegedly punching that fascist bigot in the face. Besides the fact that I didn’t see what happened and have no reason to trust the claims of that fascist bigot, the fact is that people should not have to be subjected to racist and degrading diatribes.
As for the broader notion that “all violence is bad,” this is simply not true. Think of the violence of a woman being raped, I told the crowd. Now, think of the violence of a woman fighting back against that rape and possibly injuring or even killing the rapist. Is the violence of the rapist and the violence of that woman the same? Many students shook their heads. I challenged people to look at the tremendous global violence that this system carries out every day for its mere functioning—its armies, its police forces, its prisons, its borders, and so much more that enforces relations that trap billions on the edge of survival. All that violence is going to keep going on until there is a revolution which, when the time comes for that under different conditions than today, will have to defeat and dismantle this system’s armies by force. And, in those circumstances, that will be like the violence of the woman fighting back against rape—liberating violence.
Around this time, students who had been listening intently for more than an hour began to sit down, making the decision to sit back and listen to all of what we might have to say. Afterwards, many thanked us for standing up to such hate but also for all the new information we had shared. They were moved particularly around what we said about the depth and outrageousness of white supremacy and police terror as well as the vicious oppression of women and the liberating views on all of this that we championed. At the same time, they were deeply compelled and intrigued by the rest of what we were saying—about revolution, about violence, about the Bible and atheism, about communism, and in our answers to the many different questions and arguments that got thrown at us. Dozens signed up, took flyers and got copies of Revolution newspaper.
See also earlier coverage from Sunsara Taylor at Mizzou:
This whole scene went on for over four hours. The crowd would swell and then thin out, fluctuating from about 200 at its peak to about 30 at its thinnest. At times we would lose the center of gravity to some reactionary or fascist and then we would fight and gain it back. At one point, one of the Black men who had traveled from upstate New York asked to get back on the mic. In addition to wanting to share his own thinking, he seemed concerned that perhaps all the talk of communism might be turning off students who otherwise would be interested in the fight against racism. Not afraid of anything he might bring up, even if he chose to go up against what we were putting forward, we gave him the mic. He did go at the question of communism, but quite differently than I had expected. He challenged the students: “Don’t be afraid when you hear the word communism. What you should be afraid of is capitalism—that is what brought slavery, that is what brought white supremacy, that is what brought rape culture and all the rest. Communism...” he paused, turned, and pointed at me, “is this nice lady right here!” I threw both arms up in the air with pride and then, together with him and many others, plunged in to further open air debate over some of the most important and pressing questions confronting humanity today.
A Terrorist Attack in Paris, a World of Horrors, and the NEED FOR ANOTHER WAY
November 15, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these "outmodeds," you end up strengthening both.
While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these "historically outmodeds" has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system, and in particular the U.S. imperialists.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:28
Get your free e-book copy of BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakianhere.
On November 13, simultaneous attacks across Paris took the lives of at least 129 people. ISIS—the reactionary armed Islamist movement now dominating parts of Syria and Iraq—has apparently taken “credit” for these attacks. The victims were normal everyday people. They were eating in cafes, attending a soccer game, or walking down the street. They were people of all walks of life, from France and around the world. The gruesome and arbitrary nature of the killing—including the massacre of 89 people trapped in a concert hall where a rock band was playing—could only be intended to create an atmosphere of societal chaos and fear. And the attack was clearly undertaken with knowledge that it would be invoked by France and the U.S. to supposedly justify new rounds of repression and war. The cruel horror of the Paris attacks should be unequivocally denounced.
At the same time, the French president declared this an “act of war” and he would hit back with a “merciless” response. We should be clear. This threat from France—and the ways in which this attack has taken over the airwaves and political life in the U.S. since it was carried out—are very ominous. This almost certainly means one thing: more war and military attacks in the Middle East coming from France, the other European powers, and the U.S. itself, taking even more lives and creating all that many more refugees to add to the literally millions now desperately seeking to survive, who often lose their lives in the process.
And so the nightmarish dynamic which billions of people today find themselves locked in intensifies and escalates. The world cries out for another way. To get that other way, we have to understand first of all the root causes of the dynamic that IS going on.
A WORLD of Horrors
Again, we should be clear: The attack in Paris was aimed at advancing a reactionary agenda by spreading terror. It was cruel and unjust and horrific.
As was the U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan on October 3—a conscious act of state-sponsored terrorism—that destroyed a desperately needed hospital, and murdered a dozen courageous doctors along with volunteers from around the world and Afghan patients. Since 2001, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has led to the death of tens of thousands of civilians. And the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq—which was the crucible in which ISIS formed and arose—directly killed many tens of thousands and “indirectly” caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more.
As was the terrorist bombing, for which ISIS took credit, on a poor Shi’a neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon, on November 12. It targeted a community where Islamic forces allied with the Syrian government, Iran, and Russia have a base of support—but the bombs were aimed at and killed dozens of civilians. The multisided war between contending reactionary powers and forces in Syria has resulted in 250,000 deaths, and over 12 million people have been driven from their homes into refugee camps or the dangerous trek to persecution and concentration camps in Europe.
As was the bombing of a wedding party in Yemen on October 8 by the U.S. armed and backed Saudi regime. This was the second time in a month that Saudi Arabian fighter jets rained death on a wedding party in Yemen—this time killing 30 people. In late September, Saudi rockets hit another wedding party in Yemen, killing 130 people. The Saudi reign of terror is aimed at the civilian population in areas where anti-Saudi forces are in control. And the Saudis have waged war since the summer in Yemen, using U.S.-supplied cluster bombs—a weapon outlawed in most parts of the world—to slaughter several thousand civilians, including hundreds of children.
This whole nightmarish inhuman cycle must be stopped.
Two Reactionary Poles of Oppression
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.
The rulers of the U.S. portray themselves as the global “good guys” in all this. They cover over the fact that their whole system can only function and proceed through the bitter, grinding exploitation of literally billions of people, through the plunder of all of nature, and through the oppression of whole peoples and of women, half of humanity. They insist that people forget the foundations of this empire in genocide and slavery, and endless wars for empire around the world.
The Islamic fundamentalists like ISIS portray themselves as the only opposition to this. Their opposition is one of small-time oppressors hungering to be big time ones. The society they enforce is one of brutal oppression of women and the violent enforcement of ignorance and superstition. Nobody who has an ounce of justice in their heart should have anything to do with this stuff and in fact should oppose it, strongly. Humanity is actually capable of something much greater: a new society, without exploitation or oppression.
As we say on our website and in our newspaper, all the time:
“It is this system that has got us in the situation we’re in today, and keeps us there. And it is through revolution to get rid of this system that we ourselves can bring a much better system into being. The ultimate goal of this revolution is communism: A world where people work and struggle together for the common good...Where everyone contributes whatever they can to society and gets back what they need to live a life worthy of human beings...Where there are no more divisions among people in which some rule over and oppress others, robbing them not only of the means to a decent life but also of knowledge and a means for really understanding, and acting to change, the world.
“This revolution is both necessary and possible.”
And, as we also say, “Because of Bob Avakian and the work he has done over several decades, summing up the positive and negative experience of the communist revolution so far, and drawing from a broad range of human experience, there is a new synthesis of communism that has been brought forward—there really is a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world, and there is the crucial leadership that is needed to carry forward the struggle toward that goal.”
If you are reading this, if you found yourself agonizing over what happened in Paris—or what happened before that in Kunduz or Gaza last year or anywhere of dozens and hundreds of other places—you need to dig into this. This really IS a way out of the madness, and everyone owes it to themselves, to their fellow humans, and to the future to really engage this.
At the same time, right now, this cycle of terror and horror must be broken through. Attacks like the one in Paris are unconscionable and must be denounced. But we must not enlist in, but resist our rulers’ moves to take advantage of these attacks to justify even worse ones. We must resist when they move to implement more repression (which they claim will “keep us safe” but actually ratchets up the problem). We must resist when they try to escalate their invasions, drone attacks, and bombings. Resist when they whip up patriotism and prejudice, including ugly attacks on immigrants. To remain silent and complicit in all this is to contribute to the whole cycle and to strengthen both sides in the reactionary clash of the West vs. Jihad.
In the absence of a positive, liberating alternative, and in the absence of determined and visible opposition in “the West,” the crimes of the U.S. drive people into the arms of reactionary Jihad. What is needed—and what is morally right—is visible, determined opposition to the crimes of “our government” on the part of those of us in the U.S., France, and other imperialist countries. Breaking through to another world, and breaking out of the current vicious cycle requires that people around the world see that the rulers do not speak for us. And that we stand with the interests of humanity.
Editors' Note on Getting Out the Statement "A Terrorist Attack in Paris, a World of Horrors, and the NEED FOR ANOTHER WAY"
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The terrorist attacks in Paris have stunned millions in this society and the world over. Everywhere people are talking about these events and responding—in twos and threes and in larger groupings, including people who may be coming together to express their grief and solidarity with the citizens of Paris and some who may be protesting the draconian repression and military measures being taken by the French and U.S. governments. In the swirl of these events revcom.us has published an important statement which speaks to these events and as the title says: the Need to Bring Forward Another Way. This statement needs to reach thousands and thousands of people in this country and around the world.
At the same time, the struggle to carry forward the battle to Stop Murder by Police must advance and this movement is approaching another key juncture: the one year anniversary of the wanton murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by Cleveland police. This too is critical in the battle to emancipate all humanity.
So, print up this PDF of the revcom.us statement, distribute it everywhere people are gathering and as you build for the November 22 actions. Post it on the internet wherever you can and tweet out the headline. Get it out on the campuses. And wherever people are debating and discussing the attacks in Paris.
Statement from Cornel West 11/12/2015: "Stay strong. Stay strong. Stay strong!"
November 13, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
2015-11-12
Dr. Cornel West
To my dear and courageous brothers and sisters of all colors, though disproportionately chocolate, you at the University of Missouri have set a great example that inspires all of us in our struggle for unarmed truth and unapologetic love.
We know that justice is what love looks like in public and you've kept alive the spirit of Mohammad Ali, the spirit of Tommy Smith, the spirit of John Carlos and the spirit of Donny Hathaway and Nina Simone.
I stand with you and I stand with my brother Carl Dix as we continue to fight for stopping mass incarceration and ensuring that the humanity of each and every one of us is respected and we're treated with dignity and decency.
An Important Step Forward in the Fight Against Police Terror—That Must Now Be Taken Further
November 2, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Rise Up October, October 24, 2015, New York City. The front of the march. Photo: Erik McGregor
The demonstrations on October 22 to 24 against police murder and terror said in unmistakable terms that THIS MUST STOP. The thousands who testified, resisted, and marched through the streets made clear that there was a force, a movement, that is determined to draw a clear line, challenging everyone, throughout the country, to RISE UP against this.
Last fall, the exoneration of the blue-coated murderers of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and then Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, provoked thousands to pour into the streets for weeks and weeks, and then in Baltimore in the spring people rose up in righteous rebellion. In response, the powers that be acted to both repress and derail the movement. The people needed to come back into the streets, determined to STRUGGLE to end the genocidal madness of rampant police murder and mass incarceration, and determined to reach out broadly to do so. The dual tactics of outright attack and the sugar-coated poison of misdirection actually intensified in the days leading up to and through these demonstrations. (See "Cops Can't Do Their Job on Video—Then What IS Their 'Job'?!" "No, Mr. President! Aiding and Abetting the Slow Genocide of Black People Is a Crime Against Humanity," and “Reality Check on October 20 Events in East Harlem, NYC: The REAL Problem,” which goes into how an incident with an NYPD cop just days before Rise Up October was used as a pretext to attack the protest.)
In the face of all this, all kinds of people came out. This included the force of over 100 family members who had lost loved ones to police murder, fighting through their pain to let the world know what happened and expressing a determination to put an end to this terror and murder. It included voices of conscience who joined with those parents and, in some cases, came under attack for doing so. It included students coming from scores of different colleges and high schools, often having made this a question on the whole campus. It included those, again sometimes in groups and sometimes alone, coming from the neighborhoods where the police terror goes on daily and where mass incarceration scars the lives and destinies of whole peoples. It included people from the suburbs, clergy and religious people of different faiths, artists and scientists and teachers, who refused to turn their heads or be silent. It included people from all the different regions of this country. And it also included the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Revolution Club: bringing out the full picture of WHY this was happening, pointing to the solution to this through revolution and the leadership of that revolution in Bob Avakian, and showing how this struggle contributed to that, and—at the same time—giving leadership and coherence to a movement that is capable of uniting with everyone who could be united right now to demand that this genocidal murder STOP.
Protesters blocking the entrance to Rikers. Photo: revcom.us
The outpouring hit with real impact. There were page-one pictures and stories in some of the major New York City papers, as well as broader coverage nationally and internationally. (See the Stop Mass Incarceration Network website, stopmassincarceration.net, for the national and international media coverage of Rise Up October). Then, directly after the demonstrations, forces in the police (including NYPD Commissioner Bratton) and the media (especially but not only FOX News) not only attacked the demonstrations but also specifically targeted film director Quentin Tarantino for coming to the demonstrations and calling out murder by the police. The movement hit back, and through all this began to pose the challenge to even broader sections of society: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? Now, in a certain sense, the struggle has been joined on certain terms—you’re either for keeping this shit, in some form or other, or you’re against it.
Now we all have to carry forward this whole “Rise Up! Which Side Are You On?” standard of uniting ALL who want to struggle to stop police murder. This means defending Quentin Tarantino in that context, mobilizing people against further outrages as they happen, and really getting people out there for the November 22 day of action to forcefully demand the indictment of the cops who murdered 12-year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun. (See "Voices of Conscience Step Up in Defense of Quentin Tarantino and Condemn the Police Union Threats and Boycott" and "November 22: Justice for Tamir Rice!"; and go to "Breaking News and Outrages" for news of ongoing outrages, like the videotaped police brutalization of a high school student, a young Black woman, in South Carolina.)
These three days in October were just a foreshadowing of the movement that we actually need and which in fact is possible. The thousands who came out, their spirit of militant STRUGGLE, and their determination to CHALLENGE ALL OF SOCIETY TO TAKE SIDES marked the emergence of what could be and what must be something new. The fact that at least in a beginning way new people worked and sacrificed to make this happen—donating money, throwing themselves into organizing and helping to lead—provides a foundation for this to really go forward in a more powerful way. The program of struggle called for by Carl Dix and Cornel West (“A Message from Cornel West and Carl Dix on October 24”) gives a focus. In the days to come, the movement needs to both dig into what we did right and what we did wrong—our strengths as well as our shortcomings and mistakes... but even more, it needs to do this in the spirit of going forward, united in even more powerful expressions, until this is actually STOPPED.
What we said in our editorial in September, applies to the task before us now:
There is a place for you in this. Your ideas, your support, your efforts are urgently needed... In fact, this can only happen on the scale that is absolutely necessary if many, many people throw in on this, now—people who have been fighting this, as well as people who are just now coming to the fight. You are needed. We face a decisive moment, a crossroads, where terms are being set as to what is legitimate, what will be tolerated and what will be opposed. Lives are at stake. Be part of determining the outcome.
Carl Dix at the October 24 Rally: "Let's do all that we can to stop the horror of police murdering our people. And then let's do even more because we gotta stop this.
October 26, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Carl Dix speaking at the rally. Photo: Eino Sierpe
Okay, Okay. You have seen the faces of the lives that have been stolen by the police. Beautiful lives that were cut down too short. This is unacceptable and our demand is very simple: police terror, police murder must stop. Not be reduced a little bit. Must stop!
Now sometimes people say well, your demand needs to be more concrete than that, Carl. So let me give you a concrete demand:
Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!
[chanting with crowd:]
Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!
One more time.
Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!
Now look, that’s a simple and just demand. But we need to be very clear that when we raise that demand we gotta fight for it. Because there is a whole system that’s behind those killer cops. It ain’t just a few killer cops on the beat with some rogue DAs, or corrupt DAs, district attorneys. It’s a whole system all the way up to the top, that arrested people en masse when we protested these killings over this last year, that demonizes our people, especially the young people to try to justify these murders.
Now when I say that, some people might be thinking, well wait a minute Carl, didn’t Obama say he was going to do something about this a couple of days ago? Didn’t he say that he supports Black Lives Matter? Well, let’s be clear. The Obama who said something about Black Lives Matter six months ago said that the youth of Baltimore were thugs and criminals when they rose up in response to the police murder of Freddie Gray. So let’s not get twisted by that. He’s trying to rope us back in. He also said along with saying I’m gonna do something, it has to be incremental. Now what does that mean? It’s gotta be small, slow steps to change things. That ain’t going to cut it. This has got to stop. We don’t want no small reduction of the people they warehouse in prison or the people that they kill. We want it stopped.
And look, we are going to fight to make that happen. Ain’t nobody going to do it for us. And we are doing that today. We’ve been doing that this week. Thursday, No More Stolen Lives/Say Their Name. Thursday afternoon, march and rally for the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality. Yesterday, some of us put our bodies on the line to pose the demand, Shut Down Rikers Island—that debtors’ prison and torture chamber. And that’s what we’re doing to do today and we’re going to keep doing that.
And we are delivering a very serious message: Stop police terror, which side are you on? Because don’t tell me no BS about “I’m in the middle” or “I’m neutral.” This is murder, this is genocide we’re dealing with. And in the face of a genocide there ain’t no neutrality. You’re either on the side of acting to stop that genocide or you’re on the side that says it’s ok for it to happen. That’s the two sides. Which side are you on? That’s the challenge we’re bringing to people.
And look, I can give you the numbers of how many people the police kill, more than 930 since January first. But this ain’t about numbers for me. This is personal. Look I sat with Mertilla Jones a few days after her granddaughter, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, had been murdered by the Detroit police. I met Sharon Irwin a couple of days after her grandson, Tony Robinson, had been murdered by the police. I’ve worked with many more families, many more than I can talk about now. I have to say, my wife’s brother more than 40 years ago was gunned down by the police on his mother’s doorstep, one day after they had told her she would never see her son alive again. So this is personal for me. And it is up to us to stop this. We have to take that on.
And when I say stop this, it’s not just the horror of what the police is doing to Black and Latino people although we gotta stop that. It’s also the attacks on women in this society; it’s the attacks on our immigrant sisters and brothers; it’s what happens to lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender people; it’s the wars for empire; it’s the way they are destroying the environment of the planet. And I will tell you it’s going to take revolution, nothing less to end all those horrors once and for al. That’s what it’s going to take.
Now, some people tell me I shouldn’t talk about this. But I gotta talk about it because it’s what you need to hear. Fred Hampton, a brother that I really respected 40 years ago, said something that I’m going to repeat right now. He said: “I am a revolutionary.”
And I feel like some of y’all feel like that way too. So say it with me: I am a revolutionary. [with the crowd:] I am a revolutionary.
And look, I’m not just a revolutionary. I’m a revolutionary communist. I follow a man, Bob Avakian, who’s got a strategy for making revolution and a blueprint for bringing a new society into being. You need to check him out if you want to be free.
But look, all of us gotta be in this together. Cornel West, who you will hear shortly, is a Christian, a revolutionary Christian. I’m here with the clergy. I’m here with the students, I’m here with the people from the community. I’m here with the victims of police murder. We all have to be in this together. Our diversity, our different voices make us stronger.
Now let me say this. Fred Douglass said this a while ago, more than 100 years ago. I’m not quite old enough to go back to then, but I know what he said. He said power concedes nothing without a demand. That was true then and it’s true now. It’s gonna take struggle to bring about a change for the better. And that is what we’re doing sisters and brothers. But we gotta keep doing it. And we should not pat ourselves on the back for having been out here today and say we did a good job and feel good about ourselves. That ain’t it. We gotta be in this for the long haul. It says stop police terror, and that’s how long we gotta be in it.
There’s some next steps. Travis talked about it. November 22—Tamir Rice, one year ago murdered and no justice. We have to act on that. December 3, Eric Garner—one year ago they let those murdering cops go free. We gotta act on that. We gotta keep acting and not stop acting until this is stopped.
Now I’m gonna close with this. But I’ve been doing this for a long time. I am tired of putting together lists of victims killed by the police. I am tired of putting pictures on posters of people murdered by the police. I am tired of making hashtags for the victims. This has got to stop. I got an 8-year-old granddaughter. I do not want her generation to come up to be talking about what are we gonna do about the police killing our people. I want her generation to talk about this as history that really is history ’cause it don’t happen no more. Not the way that we have to talk about Emmett Till as history that echoes and reverberates today.
So let’s do all that we can to stop the horror of police murdering our people. And then let’s do even more because we gotta stop this. We gotta do it for ourselves. We gotta do it for our children. We gotta do it for future generations. Stop Police Terror! Which side are you on?
We know what side we’re on. We’re challenging the world and the whole country: Which side are you on?
"If you want others to be strong, you must be strong yourself..."
Lessons and Challenges in the Fight Against Police Murder and in Defense of Quentin Tarantino
by Annie Day | November 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
There is an important lesson being played out in the firestorm around Quentin Tarantino which has reminded me of a quote from the revolutionary leader Mao Zedong: “If you want others to be strong, you must be strong yourself.”
Quentin Tarantino at the rally. Photo: Phillip Buehler
Tarantino has acted with certitude and courage on a central question of our time: murder by police must stop! He marched in the streets and spoke with clarity before thousands, which has reverberated around the world. For this, he has come under vicious and dangerous attack. In the midst of this, he has continued to bring it back to the central question: the police need to stop killing unarmed people. He has also spoken forthrightly to why he’s under attack: to intimidate him into silence and to send a message to other prominent voices like him to shut up. And he has spoken to the deeper reality of white supremacy (see interview on MSNBC) and mass incarceration as “American slavery part two” (see interview by Michael Slate).
In the face of distortion and slander, in the face of the threat of losing his ability to make his art, in the face of being pleaded with to apologize, to tone down or “walk back” his comments, and even in the face of what are outright Mafia threats: your actions are predictable and we will hit you with a “surprise,” which coming from any other entity would be immediately deemed a terrorist threat... in the face of all this: Tarantino has not backed down.
Under Attack for Taking the Right Side Against Police Terror
During Rise Up October, the question was posed: In the struggle against police terror, which side are you on?
Read excerpts from some of the statements in support of Quentin Tarantino that came in to Rise Up October
Through fighting against this attack on Tarantino, those sides have been further clarified: Is the problem an epidemic of murder by police disproportionately aimed at Black, Latino, and Native American people backed up and approved by a legal system that rarely indicts and even more rarely convicts killer cops? Or is the problem that those who are killed are “thugs who deserve it,” with the danger to the police exacerbated by those who call out, question, or resist murder by police? Through this struggle, the sides have been sharpened and further delineated while the methods and aims of both sides are being further revealed, and many are being compelled to speak out who had before remained silent.
In the days after Rise Up October, the attacks on Quentin Tarantino grew. Initiated by the aptly named Patrick Lynch, the head of New York City’s Patrolmen’s Brutality Association, a number of other police unions joined in. Then the fascist Fox News went on the attack.
Carl Dix and Cornel West, the co-initiators of Rise Up October immediately issued statements of support and Dix issued a challenge to debate Patrick Lynch (which has still gone unanswered!). Dix took the offensive. On Fox News, he debated both the fascist mouthpiece Megyn Kelly and the notoriously racist ex-cop Mark Fuhrman. Fuhrman took the attack on Tarantino further, saying that he shouldn’t be allowed to film anywhere in the U.S. (This strain was picked up by police unions later in the week). Dix spoke clearly and unapologetically: the problem is murder by police and the fact is that this system is set up to exonerate murdering police. “As a human being with a conscience, Tarantino was right to join the protests and I was proud to stand with him.” (And in a moment that will give heart to all those with a fighting spirit for justice, Dix shut Fuhrman down beautifully.)
Over the next hours, more statements of support came in: from Charles Burnett, one of the most prominent independent Black filmmakers; from First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus; from Grammy Award-winning jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill (who was also on the Advisory Board for Rise Up October); from actor Peter Coyote; from the National Coalition Against Censorship, and more. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted in support. Prominent actor Ed Asner, who has over the years himself been a major target for speaking out for justice, made a statement. Jamie Foxx took the opportunity at an awards dinner where the cast for the The Hateful Eight (Tarantino’s new film) was being commended to say: “Quentin Tarantino, I want to say this: You are boss, you are absolutely amazing. Keep telling the truth, keep speaking the truth and don’t worry about none of the haters.” For this, Foxx himself came under attack.
At the same time, a call was put out to some of the families of victims of police murder who were part of Rise Up October and over a couple of days, more than 20 statements came in. In the statements, those who lost their loved ones at the hands of the murdering police talk about what it meant to stand beside and fight arm-in-arm with someone of Tarantino’s prominence and stature. What it meant that he listened to their stories and joined the call that this must STOP, not just fighting for justice for their own family members, but to end this once and for all for everybody. In these statements, they talk about the illegitimacy of the attack on Tarantino and how this is part of a bigger attack on those fighting for justice. They commend his courage and challenge others in Hollywood to take the same risks he has.
These statements gave all those in this fight further grounding on who has right on their side and clarified the stakes. This isn’t about narrow career or financial concerns, or any of the other bullshit that is heralded in this society as what should be our primary concern. This is about the fact that tens of thousands of lives have been stolen over the last decades under the color of authority in this country and those who kill get away with it time and time and time again. This is disproportionately aimed at Black and Brown people and is the leading edge of a larger genocidal assault.* Further, it is the responsibility of anyone with heart and a conscience to speak out against this.
Tarantino spoke to this powerfully on October 24 itself in an interview done with Michael Slate in the midst of the protest: “One of the things about the movement that actually just means so much is that they have a powerful slogan: ‘Which side are you on?’ If you’re not on our side, you’re on their side. There’s no straddling the fence. There’s no silent majority. There is none of that. You have to take a stand. If you believe it’s murder, then you gotta call it murder. And you gotta call the murderers, murderers.”
What the Courage of Your Convictions Can Inspire
In the days before Tarantino spoke about the attacks on him, lies and rumors were being actively spread that he was going to apologize. This is how it is supposed to work in this society: the great theatrics of the public apology if you go beyond the status quo dictates of what this system finds “acceptable.”
Dig into a sweeping and concrete vision for a radically different state power and society which would not just tolerate, but would foster dissent and debate about the direction of society and its ruling institutions, as part of enabling the broad masses in society to take increasing responsibility for the future direction of society towards finally abolishing all relations of exploitation and oppression. Compare this liberating and visionary Constitution to the much vaunted “freedom and democracy” of the U.S. whose armed forces aim to forcibly silence those who speak against their crimes and injustices. This Constitution is a concrete application of the new synthesis of communism developed by the leader of a new stage of communist revolution, Bob Avakian.
But Tarantino refused to go along. He stood by his comments without apology. He spoke to the way his comments were distorted, but took the offensive, going more deeply into why he said what he said and why he was right to say it. This caused two things to happen: the attack dogs got more vicious and more people joined in support. The actor, writer, and activist Viggo Mortensen spoke up; Michael Moore added his voice; Tom Morello, Mark Ruffalo, Gbenga Akinnagbe, and others tweeted in support. The fact that Tarantino did not back down gave many, many people heart and it challenged many others.
What Is Right: Defending Murder by Police or Speaking Out Against It?
On Thursday, November 5, clearly furious that Tarantino continued to “call the murdered, the murdered and the murderers, the murderers,” Jim Pasco, Executive Director of the Fraternal Order of Police issued an incredibly sinister threat. This will send chills down your spine: The head of the largest police union in the country spoke in clear Mafioso terms: “Our officers make a living trying to stop violence, but surprise is not out of the question.” He went on to say: “Something is in the works, but the element of surprise is the most important element... Something could happen anytime between now and [the premiere of Tarantino’s new movie]. And a lot of it is going to be driven by Tarantino, who is nothing if not predictable.”
This caused a groundswell of outrage in print and on social media, with many shocked at the lengths the police spokespeople were going to intimidate Tarantino into silence. Most recently, the executive director of the ACLU of Southern California issued an important statement in support of Tarantino. It also forced many to ask the question: The response of the police force to murder of unarmed people is to threaten those who criticize it?
This is very good and shows that, while we have to take their threats seriously, they can also backfire by revealing their true character: all they have to rely on in the end is illegitimate force and violence.
Carl Dix responded: “The Mafia style attack coming from Jim Pasco of the FOP would be cartoonish thuggery if it weren’t so dangerous. Artists need to be able to speak for justice without attacks and retribution... everyone should join us in speaking out against these bullying tactics. We should also understand that like any bully, they become most vicious when they’re exposed. In the face of video after video of unarmed Black, Latino, and Native Americans being tazed, stomped, brutalized, and shot in the back by police—their only answer to those who speak out and criticize is repression and force. Whether it be the tanks and tear gas in the streets of Ferguson or boycotts and bully threats aimed at silencing prominent voices who speak out. We say no to this! We will #SideWithQuentin and we will build a powerful movement of resistance to STOP murder by police.”
Right now: many more need to come forward. Many more—of all nationalities and from many different perspectives—need to speak in defense of Quentin Tarantino’s right to stand for justice without fear of retribution, including many more prominent voices. This is obviously not the safe or easy road, and it is not without sacrifice. It means going against the tide and being made—by the armed enforcers of this system—to pay a price. But this is what is required if we are to open up the air in society for many more to come forward in the fight for justice.
At the same time, we have to accomplish the mission that Rise Up October set out: “...we aim to change the whole social landscape, to the point where a growing section of people all over take ever-increasing initiative and make it unmistakably clear that they refuse to live in a society that sanctions this outrage [of police murder and mass incarceration], and where those who do NOT feel this way are put on the defensive.”
By having each other’s backs, the courage of our convictions and by challenging others—this is not just necessary, it is possible. And it is part of fighting for a world where mothers and fathers don’t have to fear for their children’s future because of the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the body they are in.
These are excerpts of just some of the statements that came in to Rise Up October. We encourage people to read all of them here.
L’Sana DJahspora, father of Cinque “Q” DJahspora, murdered by Jackson, Tennessee, police, November 6, 2014
...He put his name, face and livelihood on the line to stand and identify with us, with justice and what is simply right. Place that up against those voices of injustice and Quentin Tarantino clearly holds the moral high ground here. His action shows courage, while police unions throw a protective circle around cowards who commit murder with the expectation of impunity. They position themselves to have NO MORAL STANDING AT ALL! First you kill our loved ones and deny us justice, you criminalize us and our families, and then you incriminate any like Tarantino who dare to stand with us and call it what it is. The police call for boycott is a throwback to the blacklist of the 50s and 60s, and dares anyone to stand on behalf of people of color. Tarantino stood with us, stood with those suffering profoundly from the terror; he connected with the families as we sought to connect with each other. Stack up Quentin Tarantino’s moral stand and authenticity against the government-sanctioned criminal terror raging across this nation, and it is clear who is on the right side of history.
Nicholas Heyward, Sr., father of 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward, Jr., murdered by the NYPD, September 27, 1994. He was playing with a brightly colored toy gun.
...I am asking that everyone who believes in truth and justice to please stand up and support Mr. Quentin Tarantino for standing up and being unafraid to say: enough is enough. No more killing innocent unarmed humans nationwide and never being held accountable. We refuse to be intimidated by police and government repression or by threats of boycott on those who seen the injustice for far too long, and have risen up to support the families who suffer from this injustice system. Please stand up and support our brother, Mr. Quentin Tarantino.
Marcus Pettiford, oldest son of Anthony Anderson, murdered by Baltimore police, September 21, 2012 ...Whether he has faced police abuse or not, he came to Rise Up October and talked with us, bonded with us. Let’s not sugarcoat anything. This is a Caucasian man talking about African Americans and our experience for decades and decades. Here is a man speaking on our behalf. But the system wants us down and out, swept under the rug, they don’t want him exposing all of what we have to go through, so here comes the backlash. Well, I would like for everyone in Hollywood to speak out regardless of the backlash. Put your reputation and career on the line. I challenge everyone else to do as Quentin Tarantino has done.
Paris Bey, cousin of Janisha Fonville, murdered by Charlotte, North Carolina, police, February 18, 2015
Quentin Tarantino means a lot to us—at Rise Up October, he wasn’t just a film director or a public face—he was a person who cares what cops are doing to us and to all the families. He’s not afraid to lose endorsements and he is not scared of boycotts. He walked with us the whole time, speaking with us, hearing us. He gets big ups for that and a lot of respect. And it pushes our movement forward! Yes, the media focuses on his involvement in Rise Up October... but... WHY was he there? He was there for the victims who have lost loved ones to murder by police... Tarantino called the murders murder and the murderers the murderers. The fact is he stood up for us. He put himself out on a limb for us. We are behind him 100%, no ifs, ands or buts. Hollywood A-listers worry about becoming D-listers and don’t want to lose their livelihood or money. Hollywood: what is wrong is wrong and what is right is right. We are being shot down. Stand up for justice. The platform you have is powerful. You have the power to change everything. Which side are you on?
Marilyn Covarubbias, mother of 37-year-old Daniel Covarrubias, murdered by police in Tacoma, Washington, April 21, 2015
It took a lot of guts, a lot of heart, for Quentin Tarantino to come out and speak [about] the killings that have been happening. And I have much love for him, because he didn’t need to do that but he did it. And when his movies come out I’ll come see them 5 or 6 times that night. And I’ll invite everyone else I know to come see them too. Because I love that man for doing that.
Excerpt from “We Side With Quentin,” a statement from Hector Villagra, Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California, issued November 6, 2015:
“The ACLU of Southern California stands with Mr. Tarantino and supports his condemnation of those police officers who have killed unarmed citizens who pose no threat. He has given voice to the frustrations of millions of Americans who stand for justice, and we raise our voice with his, speaking up as we have for decades to make it very clear that we condemn not the police, but police brutality and challenge the conspiracy of silence around police abuse.”
A beautiful struggle against racist outrages and white supremacy has broken out on the campus of the University of Missouri. This righteous struggle has spread to college campuses across the country, and it is laying bare the ugly reality of white supremacy. People involved in this struggle are getting a sense of their strength, and they are being opened up to dig into why these outrages are still happening 150 years after slavery was supposed to be ended, and what can and must be done to end them.
All the students and faculty who have been part of this struggle need to take up the Call to mark one year since the police murder of Tamir Rice. And all of us involved in the fight to STOP police terror need to take the Call for Justice for Tamir to everyone on the campuses who has been involved in this struggle and to everyone who has been moved by it.
This struggle is connected in every way to the fight to STOP murder by police. The white supremacy that's driving the racist outrages on this and other campuses is the same white supremacy that drives the terror police enforce in Black and Latino communities across the country. This is opening up a precious moment that needs to be seized on.
So take the Call to mark one year since the police murder of Tamir to the campuses. Gather the family members of police murder victims, the youth who are tired of being treated like criminals, the clergy and everyone else who was in NYC for RiseUpOctober. Let's all go together to the students and faculty to make plans to be part of demanding Justice for Tamir, and get those plans posted online
The Stop Mass Incarceration Network has called on people to protest and demand justice on November 22. Their call begins: “ONE YEAR ago, Tamir Rice was killed in less than two seconds of police arriving to the park where he was playing. The whole world has seen the video. First you see Tamir, a child playing by himself with a toy gun, with no one else in sight. At one point he puts the ‘weapon’ down on the sidewalk, makes a snowball, throws it, picks up the toy gun again. If you didn’t know what was coming, it would just be this cute scene of a child being... a child! Then a police car suddenly appears. Tamir walks towards it, the toy in his waistband. The car stops, and within two seconds a cop shoots Tamir. Though he is still alive, the cops do nothing to assist him or even to try and make him comfortable.
“Will the police get away with the murder of Tamir Rice? NO! This cannot be allowed!
“One year since the murder of Tamir Rice with NO justice for his family. A Grand Jury investigation has begun in Cleveland, OH but actions of county prosecutor Timothy McGinty have greased the skids to a repeat of the decision not to indict the officers responsible for murdering Tamir, as we saw with the police that murdered Eric Garner and Michael Brown and too many others.”
The cold-hearted police murder of Tamir Rice, the obscene refusal of authorities to even charge the police who murdered him for a whole year, and now the outrageous moves by the prosecutor to manipulate a grand jury exoneration of the killers—this is an intolerable outrage... and it is bigger than that. What is at stake here is what kind of society are we going to be living in? Let’s be real: If police can murder an unarmed 12-year-old boy playing in a park, a child posing no threat to anyone, and get away with it, what Black person, or Latino person, or Native American, anywhere, doing anything, can feel that they do not have a target on their back for police to aim at?
Nobody should turn their head and go about business as usual while Tamir’s murderers go unpunished. We cannot sit back and wait and see what the authorities are going to do here because they have ALREADY covered up this murder for nearly a year and they are sending out signals they are about to let the murdering police go free.
Which side are you on?
On November 22, be in the streets. Find a protest in your area and spread the word, and join it. Or if there’s nothing planned in your area, organize a protest in your community, your school, your workplace, or wherever you are. Do the right thing yourself, and struggle with people to get off the sidelines and into the streets.
A Blatant Attempt to Whitewash the Police Murder of Tamir Rice
Reposted December 28, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Update 12/29/15: On December 28, 2015, the IN-justice system announced NO charges against the police who murdered 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland on November 22, 2014. The prosecutor led a Grand Jury to come to that decision in part through procuring reports from utterly un-credible “expert witnesses” who were neither experts, nor objective in their approach. The following article was originally posted at revcom.us on November 9, 2015, exposes how these biased reports were being used to prepare the Grand Jury, and public opinion, to not bring charges against the police who killed Tamir.
Here are the uncontested facts:
Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old playing in a park who was gunned down by police in Cleveland, Ohio on November 22, 2014.
On November 22, 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun, by himself, in an empty park near his home. Someone called in a 911 report on seeing Tamir in the park, stating that he was probably a juvenile and the gun was probably a toy.
Acting on this report, two Cleveland cops, Officers Loehmann and Garmback, drove their squad car to a few feet away from Tamir, who at that point had the toy in his waistband. Within 1.7 seconds of their arrival, before the car had even come to a full stop, Loehmann jumped from the car and shot Tamir twice; the shots were fatal.
As Tamir lay bleeding on the sidewalk, the cops failed to administer first aid or even comfort. When Tamir’s sister ran towards him to help, the cops tackled and handcuffed her and put her in their squad car, just a few feet away from where her brother lay dying.
Immediately the police put out the typical story when cops kills someone—of Tamir supposedly threatening them with what they believed was a gun, refusing their repeated requests to put it down until finally they had “no choice” but to shoot him. But then it turned out there was video footage of the killing that exposed the police story as total lies.
This came at the height of protests across the U.S. against police getting away with murder of Black and Brown people. The footage from the video was so damning that it seemed that no one could deny that at least this was a clear case of police murdering an unarmed, unthreatening, and defenseless child—that this time, the system would just have to indict, try, and convict the cops for cold-blooded murder. Even the judge who reviewed the video (and ruled in June that there was “probable cause” to charge the police with homicide) said: “The video in question is notorious and hard to watch. After viewing it several times, this court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly.”
But flash forward to today, almost one year since the shooting—there have been NO CHARGES OR INDICTMENTS brought against either of these murderers. And in a clear indication of intent to completely whitewash this crime, in early October the Cuyahoga County prosecutor released two “expert reports” to the media, both of which claimed that the police killing of Tamir Rice was “reasonable,” and denounced criticism of the killing as “Monday-morning quarterbacking,” strongly implying that there should be no criticism of police killings, ever.
The mainstream media treated these reports as the considered opinions of neutral experts who had carefully and honestly examined the facts—the message was that “perhaps this shooting too was ‘more complicated’ than people thought.” As such, these reports, and the media coverage of them, are clearly setting the stage for the grand jury hearing this case to return no indictments.
Rice Family’s Attorneys Expose the Experts and Their Reports
Now three attorneys working for the Rice family have written a scathing letter to the Cuyahoga County prosecutor that carefully and cuttingly reveals that these prosecution “experts” are not neutral and not expert, and that their reports blatantly ignore the facts in an extremely convoluted effort to get around what millions of people saw happen with their own eyes. (A PDF of the lawyers’ letter is available online.)
Here are some of the key things that the attorneys’ letter brings out (all quotes that follow are from the attorneys’ letter):
These “experts” are in reality neither “neutral” nor “expert:”
One of them, Lamar Sims, was hired by the prosecutor to do a supposedly objective investigation “two months after he gave a television interview on Denver public access television... in which he [Sims] expressed pro-police opinions about the shooting of a young child playing with a toy gun, a clear reference to the shooting of Tamir Rice. Sims also participated in an event centered on the police’s use of force in March 2015 hosted by your office, where he expressed pro-police sentiments.” [Emphasis added]
The other “expert,” Kimberly Crawford, was hired “even though she has been discredited as an expert in this field after the U.S. Department of Justice rejected her opinion in the high profile 1992 fatal Ruby Ridge shootings on the grounds that her legal analysis was flawed, distorted the applicable case law, and improperly quoted cases selectively in an effort to exonerate the police in their use of deadly force.” [Emphasis added]
In other words, the prosecutor’s office went looking for, and hired, investigators that it already knew would issue reports exonerating the cops.
It is virtually unprecedented for a prosecutor to introduce pro-defense “expert reports:”
At this stage of the judicial process, the prosecutor has the job of presenting the argument for bringing criminal indictments, based on the known facts of the case. (As noted before, a judge has already ruled that there is probable cause for charges to be brought.) Once charges are brought, defense attorneys can bring in experts at the trial who will back up the defense theory. But in this case, the prosecutor is playing the role of the defense attorney for the cops who murdered Tamir, hiring experts to justify not bringing the case to trial at all.
The reports rely on “evidence” that has already been proven false by the video:
“Sims goes so far as to say that the statement Loehmann allegedly made to the FBI agent that he gave commands to Tamir before shooting is of ‘particular import’—even though that statement is plainly hearsay and demonstrably false, as the video makes it clear that there was no time for Loehmann to issue any commands.” The Rice family attorneys go on to note that Crawford “repeatedly claims that the video shows Tamir ‘reaches toward his right side waist and lifts his jacket,’ even though Sims acknowledges that ‘the video is grainy and it is unclear—from the video—whether Rice reaches for his gun.’” (We would add that no honest person watching the video can “see” Tamir reaching for the toy gun.)
The reports disregard the fact that the cops were caught plainly lying and cannot be considered as credible witnesses:
“The reports fail to explore the credibility issues surrounding police claims that the officers warned Tamir three times immediately before shooting, when the 1.7-second time frame makes it apparent that did not happen. The ‘experts’ made no attempt to trace back those demonstrably false claims to the officers themselves—the natural source—which would undercut the officers’ credibility.”
The reports make a big deal of saying the officers didn’t know that Tamir was a child and the gun was a toy—while ignoring the fact that they killed Tamir before they could possibly have determined the circumstances:
“...given the undisputed fact ... that Loehmann shot Tamir within 1.7 seconds of arriving at the scene, no reasonable officer would have had time to make any assessment at all about Tamir’s age or toy (which he was not even holding when Loehmann shot him). ... according to these so-called ‘experts,’ it is reasonable for police officers to drive into a park ... and immediately open fire on any African American boy they encounter there.”
****
There is much more in the attorneys’ letter, including examples of blatantly ignoring established case law about when police shootings are legally justified, and we encourage our readers to read the entire document. But there is more than enough even in the excerpts cited here to show these so-called “expert reports” for what they really are: part of a cold-blooded move by the authorities to exonerate the blatant, vicious, and completely UN-reasonable murder of Tamir Rice—and in doing so, to justify and unleash further levels of police terror and murder.
* Writing in the New York Times “Book Review” section (Sunday, October 25, 2015), speaking about the convention in 1787 that “led to the creation of the United States Constitution,” Robert E. Rubin, former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, actually says the following:
“Disagreements about the extent of federal power and the design of our democratic institutions were resolved through long arguments and, ultimately, principled compromises.” (Emphasis added)
Principled compromises?! The founding of this country on the basis of institutionalizingslavery—officially establishing the “right” to own slaves, and the status of slaves as less than human, in its founding Constitution—that is a “principled compromise” in the eyes of a present-day representative and functionary of the ruling class of this country. And the fact is that no major politician and no other significant representative of this ruling class will, or can, denounce this country, since its very founding, and denounce its “founders,” in the terms in which they deserve to be denounced: monstrously criminal. If founding a country on the basis of institutionalizing slavery is not a monstrous crime, what is? The fact that no significant representative and functionary of this system, in this country, can recognize and acknowledge this as a monstrous crime—and instead they all uphold as “great men” those, like Thomas Jefferson, who founded a country on the basis of this monstrous crime, and who perpetuated this crime for generations—that gets to the very core of what this system is all about and why there is a great need to put an end to this system at the earliest possible time, and replace it with a system that has no need, no place, and no apology for slavery in any form.
* Unbelievable as it may seem, in the 21st century there are still people—including people in positions of power and authority—who are determined to force women to bear children, regardless of the situation, the feelings, and the better judgment of those women themselves. That is a way of enslaving women to the dictates of an oppressive male supremacist, patriarchal system; and that is what the cruel fanatics who are determined to deny women the right to abortion are really all about.
* On Elections: Choosing between oppressive rulers will not stop them from ruling over and oppressing you and committing horrific crimes against humanity. This is true of all the major presidential candidates, of both the Republican and Democratic parties, and it will be true of anyone who becomes president, or occupies any major political office, under this system. What supporting these people does accomplish is making you complicit with these crimes.
November 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
People are grappling with very deep questions. We live in a world where millions of people are forced to risk their lives to flee their homes due to the imperialist wars, as well as the plunder and disruption caused by this system, and where the threat of even deeper war looms... where Black people and other oppressed nationalities within the U.S. are penned in everywhere they turn and face early graves, foreshortened and blighted lives, insult at every turn, and even murder, just for who they are... where women face a gauntlet of harassment, discrimination, oppression, and outright brutal and even murderous physical assault every single day, and where outrageous political and legal attacks, as well as vicious bullying, go on against LGBT people... and where the environmental emergency is putting the very future of life on this planet in doubt.
Is there a way to change—to really change—the way that people are forced to live? What would it take—what will it take—to not just change the many ways that people are oppressed, but to actually end oppression altogether? And what will your life be about in relation to that?
Yes, the world today IS a horror—but it doesn’t have to be this way; it is not a matter of human nature, but owing to the workings of the system. There IS a way out, a way forward. As we say elsewhere on this site, “Because of Bob Avakian and the work he has done over several decades, summing up the positive and negative experience of the communist revolution so far, and drawing from a broad range of human experience, there is a new synthesis of communism that has been brought forward—there really is a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world, and there is the crucial leadership that is needed to carry forward the struggle toward that goal.”
If you are someone who is grappling with the big questions, right now is the time for you to dig deeply into that work, even as we fight forward to change the world. You can start by getting into BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian, the “handbook of revolution,” and by taking the six-hour journey that is the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! Read these, watch them, talk them over with people inside, and outside, the movement for revolution. Let them work on you. (Revolution Books stores in local areas will be showing BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! in its entirety in December.) In addition, you can and should get into the film of the Dialogue between Bob Avakian and Cornel West, REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion. Taken together, these form a great introduction to the work BA has done... to enable you to understand what is, in fact, special about Bob Avakian.
At the same time, there is an outline, by BA himself, which lays out the key elements of the new synthesis of communism that he has brought forward and developed. This outline—The New Synthesis of Communism: Fundamental Orientation, Method and Approach, and Core Elements—provides “a basic grounding and guideline... to encourage and facilitate further engagement with the new synthesis.” Getting into this gives a sense of how BA has identified and gone at the thorniest problems facing revolutionaries and how, in the process, he has further revolutionized communism itself—identifying and breaking with those aspects of communism which were not, in fact, scientific, and putting the whole thing on a more scientific, a consistently scientific, foundation.
At the end of November, the Party will begin leading small group discussions of this outline—not to replace the ongoing engagement with BAsics or REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, but to enable people to get more deeply into the new synthesis and to really work with, and better grasp (and apply), the core elements of it. We will “walk through” the outline, taking up and going deeply into it, and exploring people’s questions as we go. (For more information on the discussion, contact your local Revolution Books store or Revolution newspaper distributor.)
If you are serious about revolution, and therefore serious about getting into BA, these sessions are for you. If you want to be part of this grappling, you should begin right now to either review, or to read for the first time, Ardea Skybreak’s book, Science and Revolution: On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism, and the Leadership of Bob Avakian (buy the book here or download PDF here). In addition, you should begin to dig into (or review, if you already have read them) the other works listed in the outline, especially “Ajith—A Portrait of the Residue of the Past,” by Ishak Baran and K.J.A., in Demarcations #4.
Don’t expect to get everything all at once—these are new ideas, and take effort. But don’t give up either—these ideas, this science, hold the key to changing the world, and the world MUST be changed. Everyone can learn to wield science and to consciously change the world on that basis. And that’s what these sessions are for—to get into these ideas and work with them, in a collective setting, and then apply them to changing the world... to making revolution and bringing in a new world.
August 19, 2012 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A point of orientation—and this is something where clarity is important...
Rather than avoiding (or being defensive) we need to be assertively and boldly—and, in a real sense, positively—putting forward the fact that BA is a "contended question"...that a lot of people who find out what he is all about really like him and what he stands for, and then there are people who really hate him, fundamentally because of what he stands for. We should speak directly to why "doofuses," backward fools, opportunists and outright counter-revolutionaries, as well as functionaries and enforcers of the present oppressive order in the world, hate him: precisely because of what it is that he is all about, what a radical break this is with this whole rotten world, while some people, out of their own deeply invested interests, or their narrow outlook and aspirations, want to hold onto this, or at least significant parts of it—and so actually hate BA for being very clear and firm, and putting forward very clearly and firmly, why we need to sweep aside and move beyond all this, and move forward to something far better.
Further, there are people who do have a basic sense of what BA stands for and have contradictory feelings about this—liking some of this, while disagreeing, or feeling uneasy, about other aspects of it—which is a concentrated reflection of their contradictory sentiments and aspirations in relation to the need and the prospect of radically changing the world.
And then there are people who themselves are confused (or misled) about what he stands for, because of distortion, slander, etc.—which further emphasizes the importance of popularizing what it is that BA actually represents (and in this way countering this distortion and slander).
Again, the point is that, rather than seeking to avoid, or to play down, this controversy around BA, we should be popularizing it, AND VERY POSITIVELY putting forward that what many really like, and what some others really hate, what still others feel conflicted about—and what many, many more need to know about—regarding BA is what in fact he is a concentrated focus of, that is, what humanity needs: a real, really radical and thorough revolution, aiming for the ultimate goal of communism throughout the world and the emancipation of all humanity as a whole from thousands of years of tradition's chains, exploitative and oppressive relations and outmoded ideas.
Doing this will actually better orient and prepare, and better lead overall, people who are being newly drawn to this and are inspired and enthusiastic about taking this out into the world, as well as people who have been part of, or partisan to, this for some time.
700 March at Loyola University, Chicago, in Support of Mizzou Struggle
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
We received the following from T.L., a student at Loyola University in Chicago:
Nationwide, colleges and universities have been responding to the events that have recently taken place at the University of Missouri. The explosion of protests, demonstrations, and rallies across the country in the past year have revived the talk about racism and systemic oppression in institutions and society. The students at the University of Missouri, mostly black, demanded new leadership in their administration, and they called for colleges and universities across the nation to stand with them. Loyola University Chicago was one of those schools. Being a private, Jesuit institution, Loyola portrays itself as a place of diversity and a place where social justice is held to a high degree. Though there is some diversity on campus and opportunity to participate in social justice affairs, Loyola has its problems, especially when it comes to the inclusiveness of students of color on campus.
Loyola University, Chicago, November 12. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Several days before the events at the University of Missouri, the leaders of the Black Cultural Center, an entity on campus for black students, called for a meeting with all the black students on campus. The meeting was called “Color My Loyola: A Reformation.” We talked about diversity on campus and representation of African-Americans on campus and in administration. As a first-year student at Loyola, I was shocked at how many problems black students faced on campus, especially in the classrooms. I was even more shocked at the fact that most of the issues addressed were systemic and micro aggressive issues. The meeting was empowering and brought awareness of the various issues at Loyola.
After the events at the University of Missouri had taken place, the black student leaders on campus called for a demonstration in solidarity with the University of Missouri. On Thursday, November 12, at 1:50 pm, students left their classes and walked towards the front of Cudahy Library and the Information Commons for the demonstration. As I was walking towards the crowd of people, I became overwhelmed with emotion at how many students there were. I was expecting it to be no more than 100 people; 700 people showed up to the demonstration. I was amazed at how many non-blacks were there.
At the beginning of the demonstration, we were yelling chants and just enjoying the moment of black unity. One of the black student leaders started to talk about the demonstration and why we were there. Then other student leaders spoke on the different issues at Loyola, such as, of course, the systemic oppression and targeting of students of color on campus, the underrepresentation of students of color on campus and in administration, the not-so-great decisions made by administration, and other issues on campus.
After some time into the demonstration, standing in the middle, I looked around and saw all of the people there and felt very empowered and heard. The most memorable part of the demonstration was when one of the leaders of the demonstration yelled the word “Ashé,” which is a statement of agreement, and the crowd would respond by yelling “power.” The word “power” was screamed so powerfully, it echoed throughout the entire campus. There probably was not one spot on campus where you could not hear the word “power” being yelled.
I also will not forget the speech of Heather Afriyie, a black senior at Loyola. Her powerful voice spoke volumes, which left a lot of the black students in tears. After Heather’s speech, the call and response “Ashé” and “power” was done once more, and the march around campus began.
The march was very powerful, yet very demanding. A plethora of chants were yelled and everyone felt a sense of unity and empowerment. We first stopped by the president of Loyola’s office. The black leaders compiled a list of demands that the black population and the other students of color would like to be done. That list was read and given to the president. After that, we marched around the campus and a part of the neighborhood Loyola borders. We were supported by the honking of cars riding past and residents in the apartments of the neighborhood peeking out there windows cheering us on.
Loyola University, Chicago, November 12. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Our final stop was the East Quad in front of the Damen Student Center, where one of the administration offices is. We locked arms and created a huge circle around the quad. The black students were called to the middle of the circle, and all of the non-black students cheered and clapped for us, which was a great overwhelming feeling. Finally, some of the black students, including myself, went into the administration office in the student center to read off the second list of demands and hand it to the administrators. The students who did not go inside stayed in the quad to continue demonstrating. Their chants could be heard very clearly from inside the building.
Overall, this experience was very empowering and showed what unity and solidarity can do for changing society and promoting justice and equality. I was born and raised in Ferguson, Missouri, and I witnessed first-hand what happened there. This experience was a lot similar to the demonstrations in Ferguson that were not shown in the media. I believe that society is progressing towards the right path. Racism and systemic oppression is coming more and more into the light, and hopefully society will continue to progress.
Berkeley: Anger and Ferment at High School and University Campuses
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a member of the Revolution Club, Bay Area
All across the country, including here in Berkeley, students are rising up on their campuses against racism and white supremacy. The Revolution Club wanted to connect up with this growing spirit of resistance. We quickly made a banner that said: WE STAND WITH THE DEFIANT STUDENTS AT MIZZOU, BERKELEY HIGH, YALE... WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON??? Police Terror, Mass Incarceration, White Supremacist Attacks, No Jobs, Miseducation... “Post-racial” My Ass! This is Amerikkka! WE NEED AN ACTUAL REVOLUTION! REVCOM.US @REVCLUB_BAY
We took the banner and a bunch of flyers with Carl Dix’s statement of support for the Mizzou students, and also the flyer about the Tamir Rice protest on November 22, and we stood right in front of Berkeley High school as students were getting out for lunch—just last week at Berkeley High almost the entire school walked out in protest of a racist threat to lynch Black students, which a student had put on the library computers. I started doing some loud agitation: “We’re standing with the students who are rising up against racism all across the country. The days when the police or racists can get away with terrorizing Black people, those days need to be over! This kid wants to talk about lynching... where did he get that idea from? The police get away with lynching Black people every day! Tamir Rice, 12-year-old boy gunned down by police in Cleveland, that was a lynching! Eric Garner strangled to death in New York, that was a lynching!”
Students were reaching out and grabbing for the flyer. We got out almost 500 in a short time. This was way different from the typical response. In fact, at times there were small crowds gathered around the banner listening seriously to the agitation, and I was able to get more into the whole history of the oppression of Black people in this country, the system that it is a part of, the need for revolution, the leadership we have for that revolution, and the challenge to get with it and dig into it.
There was some controversy. A bunch of administrators, school security, and a Berkeley cop were standing around watching us closely. One administrator, trying to discredit us, told the group of students who was gathered around us, “These people are not with the Black Student Union,” as if that somehow meant that we weren’t legitimate. The students didn’t really pay attention to him. “Who are we?” I said loudly. “We’re the Revolution Club! We’re people who give a shit about the fact that Black and Brown youth gotta grow up with a target on their back! We are building a movement for revolution to put a STOP to this and all forms of oppression. And we stand with these Berkeley High students who refuse to accept racist terror!”
A number of Black students were open to seriously talking about what it will take to end the oppression of Black people. They were proud of what they had done by walking out last week and they wanted to know what we thought. Some of the them told us about what it’s like to be a Black student at Berkeley High... how diverse and yet segregated the school is, how other students don’t want to study with the Black students who are made to feel intellectually inferior... the whole buildup of anger about racism in society and at the school that led to the walkout.
Next we took our banner, the statements from Carl Dix, and copies of Revolution newspaper, and went up to UC Berkeley, where there was a big rally for the #MillionStudentMarch. The #MillionStudentMarch was set to take place on over 100 campuses, including Cal. It had three demands: make college tuition free, cancel student debt, and a $15 minimum wage for campus employees. It was led by Black students from the Black Students Union (BSU), along with Cal Democrats, Socialist Alternative, and over 700 nurses from the California Nurses Association, who boldly marched into Sproul Plaza, the main public space on campus, chanting. There were also some high school and college students from other schools. Many of the nurses, and some of the students, carried Bernie Sanders signs. There was some discussion about Mizzou and police terror from the BSU and ABC (African Black Coalition), but that was not the main theme of the rally and march. A number of people, especially the nurses, gravitated to our banner, taking pictures and expressing their support for the students and Mizzou.
After the rally, we marched over to California Hall, the main administration building. Students and nurses plastered the whole front of the hall with signs about all the debt that students face. Someone brought a replica of a ball and chain, symbolizing the burden of student debt, and people took turns putting on the ball and chain and taking pictures of themselves. After the nurses marched to downtown Berkeley, the students from the ABC led a hundred students who remained in chanting the lines from Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
There Must Be a Defiant, Mass Outpouring for Abortion Rights This Roe v. Wade Anniversary, January 22, 2016
by Sunsara Taylor | November 9, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Editors’ Note: In this article, Sunsara Taylor gets into the context of the abortion rights protests being called for January 22-23, 2016 and the crucial importance of those actions. January 22 marks the anniversary of the 1974 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide—for the first time, women could decide for themselves whether and when they wanted to give birth to children. Before Roe v. Wade, thousands of women in the U.S. were seriously injured or died each year from unsafe illegal abortions. Countless others were forced to bear children they did not want. This decision did not come from the Supreme Court suddenly becoming “enlightened.” Only in the face of the self-sacrificing fight of women and others and overall social upheaval of the 1960s and early 1970s—as well as the larger changes in the family and social role of women driven by the shifting economic position and dynamics of the U.S. in the world—did the Supreme Court grant the right to abortion. Even then, they did not guarantee women’s right to abortion but only to a certain scope of “privacy” in this sphere. And since Roe v. Wade, there has been an enormous and mounting assault on the right to abortion, spearheaded by Christian fascists and including court decisions and state laws placing increasing restrictions on abortion.
On the last Roe v Wade anniversary, January 22, 2015, courageous protesters demanding "Abortion on demand and without apology!" STOPPED the anti-abortion “March for Life," in Washington, DC. The protests on the next Roe v. Wade anniversary, January 22-23, 2016, must be even more powerful. Photo: Stop Patriarchy
Spirited counter-protest against the 2015 "Walk for Life" in San Francisco, an annual woman-hating parade organized by a network of Catholic churches aimed at criminalizing abortion and imposing forced motherhood on women. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
Abortion clinics across this country are being boarded up. Twenty-two clinics have been shut down in Texas since 2013. In the same time, five clinics in Ohio have been shut down. In Montana, a clinic that was severely vandalized in 2014 has never re-opened. Just weeks ago in Claremont, New Hampshire, a Planned Parenthood facility that didn’t even do abortions was broken into and its computers, plumbing system, and medical equipment were destroyed with a hatchet. It is estimated that abortion clinics are being forced to close in this country at the rate of one every week and a half.
At the clinics that remain, an army of religious fundamentalists make it their mission to harass, shame, and threaten women every single day. “Murderer!” “Slut!” These words are hurled at girls as young as 11 and 12 years old. Then these women and girls are forced to endure a barrage of humiliating further restrictions—forced to make multiple trips because fascist lawmakers think the women and girls can’t be trusted with their initial decision, forced to get permission from parents or a judge as if their bodies don’t belong to themselves, forced to undergo a sonogram—sometimes vaginally—intended to provoke feelings of guilt and attachment to the fetus they do not want. Already, abortion is out of reach for huge swaths of poor, young, and rural women. Growing numbers of women are being forced to risk their lives—and sometimes end up in prison—by attempting to self-induce abortions. Others are being forced to have children against their will, with all the negative lifelong consequences of that.
Even Greater Dangers Looming
As bad as all this is, the situation threatens to get drastically worse very soon. Major cases loom before the Supreme Court that will determine how many of the drastic restrictions on abortion passed in recent years will stand—and how much further they might be allowed to go. These rulings by the Supreme Court—or just as starkly, the failure to consider and reject some of the laws currently on the books—could bring about the most sweeping and permanent changes in abortion laws in decades. They could take the most extreme closures and restrictions in the country in recent years—like those which threaten to close all but 10 out of more than 40 abortion clinics recently operating in Texas—and make them the standard across the entire country.
At the same time, there has been an orchestrated attack, directed by Christian fascists in positions of power, against Planned Parenthood--the largest abortion provider in the country. There have been moves to defund Planned Parenthood in the Congress and in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Texas and Utah. In Texas, police showed up at Planned Parenthood sites throughout the state and seized the medical records of women who’d had abortions, a gross violation of women’s privacy and a threat against any woman who’d consider abortion in the future. And through all this, threats and physical violence against abortion providers and clinics have escalated. Five Planned Parenthoods have been physically attacked—including with firebombs, arson, and hatchets—since the summer.
Break ALL the Chains!
Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution
Due to the shame and silence that hangs heavy over abortion, the illusion is widespread that these restrictions and shrinking access to abortion will only affect a few women. This is not true. One in three women will get an abortion by the time she is 45 years old. One in three. This number cuts across religious and political beliefs. No matter how silently and shamefully this secret is kept, all of us are surrounded every day by women who have had abortions. This assault on abortion access and this terror against women’s clinics is aimed at and affects all women.
The consequences of not being able to access abortion and birth control are enormous. The ability for women to engage in sexual activity without shame and without fear that their entire lives will be jeopardized disappears without access to abortion and birth control. And, when women are forced to have children against their will, their lives are foreclosed. Often, they are forced to drop out of school, driven into poverty, kicked out of their homes, or trapped in abusive homes. Whether or not any individual woman suffers this outcome, the threat of this outcome and hatred for women bound up with this stalks and affects every woman and girl.
Abortion Is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of
Supreme Court Cases Looming
A monumental case looms before the Supreme Court. Whether, and how, the Supreme Court takes up this case could have the most sweeping impact on abortion access in over a decade.
In 2013, Texas passed HB2, one of the most drastically restrictive abortion laws in the country. It mandated that all abortion clinics conform to the same standards as a mini-emergency room, even though abortion is an incredibly safe outpatient procedure that does not need that kind of setting. These dramatic physical modifications are too expensive for most clinics to meet, forcing many to close. HB2 also requires all doctors who do abortions to have standing “admitting privileges” at a local hospital. This, too, is completely medically unnecessary—both because abortion is incredibly safe (10 times safer than childbirth) and because hospitals are already required to admit emergency patients. At the same time, this requirement is impossible for most abortion doctors to meet, forcing even more clinics to close.
Abortion providers in Texas have been fighting this law in the courts since 2013. Most recently, the Fifth Circuit Federal Court approved this law, forcing the closure of all but 10 of the more than 40 clinics that operated when HB2 was first passed. Shortly after, the Supreme Court intervened and put a stay on this ruling—blocking it from being implemented (keeping about 10 of these clinics operating for the time being) until it decides whether it will entertain the appeal filed by abortion providers. If the Supreme Court decides to hear this appeal and ends up upholding the law, it will force the permanent closure of all but 10 remaining abortion clinics in the enormous state of Texas. Women in large parts of the state will have to travel hundreds of miles to access abortion. Even more ominously, this ruling will also drastically expand the kinds of restrictions to abortion that will be allowed in every state. If the Supreme Court refuses to hear this case, the stay will automatically be vacated and the effects will be the same—all but 10 abortion clinics in Texas will close and drastic restrictions will be green-lighted all across the country.
This threatens to result in the most sweeping—and truly devastating—restriction in abortion laws nationwide in decades, impacting the lives of millions of women for generations to come.
There should be absolutely no shame involved in getting an abortion. Fetuses are not babies. Abortion is not murder. Women are not incubators. If a woman decides for whatever reason that she does not want to carry a pregnancy to term, she must be allowed to terminate that pregnancy safely and without stigma. When a woman is pregnant and does not want to have a child, abortion is a perfectly moral and highly responsible choice. Without the right to decide for themselves when and whether to have children, without unencumbered access to birth control and abortion, women can never be free to participate fully and equally in every realm of society. This is precisely why abortion rights are so important and this is precisely why they are so viciously under attack by Christian fascists and patriarchs. What is truly shameful and immoral is depriving women of the right to abortion and forcing women to bear children against their will. No matter how it is dressed up, this is nothing but woman-hating.
The Need for Mass, Independent, Political Resistance
The truth is this: This fascist assault on abortion has not been and will not be stopped by “pro-choice” politicians who go out of their way to express their “respect” for the woman-haters pushing these laws, who contribute to the shame and defensiveness around abortion by claiming it should be “rare,” and who have conciliated time and again with this whole fascist juggernaut, allowing us to get to where we are today with even greater dangers ahead.
This direction has not and will not be stopped by relying on the courts. It is important and true that, for now, abortion is legal and the recent spate of restrictions DOES violate women’s constitutional rights. But, relying on the courts is not how abortion or birth control rights were won in the first place, and relying on the courts since then has been a big part of how pro-choice people have been de-mobilized and made passive as these very courts have increasingly codified and “legitimated” greater and greater restrictions. In reality, what the courts do has always been highly political and influenced by the broader culture and demands in society.
Stopping this assault, reversing this whole direction and lifting the mountains of shame and stigma off women, requires massive, uncompromising, independent political resistance.
People must go into the streets and confront and expose the woman-hating nature of this assault. People must not only say the word abortion openly, but shout it out with pride and with anger at those who would take it away. Students and others must be woken up to the emergency afoot, shaken out of their complacency and mobilized to fight. Older people who remember the gruesome and terrifying days before abortion was legal must break the silence and tell the stories of friends, mothers, sisters who died or went through harrowing experiences for lack of legal access to abortion. People who oppose abortion must be directly challenged and argued with, not just one by one but in open-air debates and in a way that draws many more into thinking anew about this question. Celebrities and public figures must speak up and join those fighting back. People throughout every corner of society must be confronted with the reality and mobilized to fight. No one should be allowed to sit on the sidelines as women’s lives and futures and rights are foreclosed.
And all this must build for and come together in powerful expressions of mass resistance to this war on women this January 22 in Washington, DC, and January 23 in San Francisco. Right up in the face of the annual marches for “life” that oppose women’s right to abortion and birth control, right on the anniversary of when abortion was made legal, masses of people must pour into the streets, declare their support for Abortion On Demand and Without Apology and join the fight for the future of women.
From International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee:
FBI Interferes with Exhibit of Work by the Renowned Native American Artist Leonard Peltier
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The following is a media advisory, dated November 14, 2015, from the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee:
An art exhibit commemorating National Native American Month at the state Department of Labor and Industries building, Tumbwater, Washington, is being dismantled in response to complaints received from law enforcers.
“This is overt government censorship and it’s unconstitutional,” said Peter Clark, co-director of the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
“Former agents of the FBI, joined by State police officers, have imposed their personal views on the citizens of the State of Washington. It’s ironic that in celebration of Native American Month, the government is suppressing freedom of expression by a Native American. But everyone should be alarmed by this occurrence. Once you allow the censorship of an artist by government, you give it the power to censor everyone.”
Those opposing the installation of the artwork were not offended by the content, which reflects Native American culture, but the artist. Leonard Peltier, who maintains his innocence, was convicted in connection with the 1976 shooting deaths of two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota.
“We are certain that had Peltier gone to trial with his co-defendants, who were acquitted on grounds of self defense; had he been allowed to present all of the evidence in his defense; had a racist juror exposed during trial not been allowed to remain on the panel; and had critical ballistics evidence reflecting his innocence not been withheld, Leonard Peltier would be a free man today.”
Appellate courts have repeatedly acknowledged evidence of government misconduct in the Peltier case—including knowingly presenting false statements to a Canadian court to extradite Mr. Peltier to the United States, and forcing witnesses to lie at trial. The federal prosecutor has twice admitted that the government “can’t prove who shot those agents.”
According to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, “the FBI used improper tactics in securing Peltier’s extradition from Canada and in otherwise investigating and trying the Peltier case.” The court concluded that the government withheld evidence from the defense favorable to Peltier, “which cast a strong doubt on the government’s case,” and that had this other evidence been brought forth, “there is a possibility that a jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier.”
As late as November 2003, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged that “...Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and its prosecution of Leonard Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.”
Imprisoned for nearly 40 years, Peltier—71 years old and in declining health—has been designated a political prisoner by Amnesty International. Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, 55 Members of Congress and others—including a judge who sat as a member of the court in two of his appeals—have all called for Peltier’s immediate release.
Tens of Thousands Across the U.S. Strike and Protest to Demand Rise in Minimum Wage
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Chicago protest, part of the November 10 National Day of Action for economic and racial justice. Photos: Bobbosphere
On November 10, more than 60,000 people in at least 270 cities and towns across the country held strikes, rallies, and protest marches demanding an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. People who work at or slightly above the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour were joined by others—students, union members, teachers—in raising this just demand.
For three years people across the country have been fighting for a rise in minimum wage, and these protests were the most widespread yet. Reports indicate that protesters blocked traffic in Brooklyn, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Boston. Workers walked out of McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City.
Not a Life Fit for Humans
The rulers of the U.S. never tire of presenting this country as the “land of opportunity.” But for tens of millions of people, a line in an old song expresses a bitter truth: “seems the land of opportunity for me is just a curse.”
For tens of millions of people in the U.S., just being able to live gets more difficult day by day, week by week—one agonizing decision after another over how to use a meager income to meet basic needs. “Should we pay the rent... or should we get medicine for the little one’s asthma?” “We need to get winter coats for the kids, but then we won’t be able to make the car payments.”
People can’t live a life fit for humans on minimum wage. Two people, often working multiple uncertain jobs, can’t support a family on the pittances paid out in these jobs. This is intolerable! A study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that one adult in Memphis would need to earn $27,000 yearly to meet the annual cost of living, by which they mean earnings that cover basic necessities without government assistance. But a full-time minimum wage earner in Memphis makes only $15,080, before taxes. In cities like New York, the gap is even greater. A full-time worker on minimum wage in New York, where the state minimum wage is $8.75, makes $18,200—but needs $43,000 just to stay even with the cost of living, even with no partners or children.
A Chasm of Inequality
The minimum wage, low as it has always been, has not kept up with the rise in the cost of living, especially of the essential means of life such as food and housing. People making minimum wage today have significantly less “earning power” than they did 20 or 30 years ago. In fact, the earning power of the minimum wage has been in decline since 1968. The percentage of the population earning at or around minimum wage is highest in the South, but the real earnings of minimum wage people are lowest in big cities, with New York City at the bottom of the list.
About 3.6 million people worked at or below minimum wage in 2012, according to the federal government’s own figures. Tens of millions more work at slightly above the minimum wage but below the $15 an hour the protesters are demanding—42 percentof the overall employed workforce, more than half of African-American workers, and nearly 60 percent of Latino workers. [See Fortune.com, http://fortune.com/2015/04/13/who-makes-15-per-hour/]
Most of the people with jobs at or just above the minimum wage are adults supporting a family—and often working two, three, even four jobs just for bare survival. Women are disproportionately among those making minimum wage. Tens of millions of people, especially children, are supported by people working these jobs. Most of these jobs provide none or few of the “benefits” essential to functioning in this society, such as health insurance, sick pay, and child care.
Much—in fact most—of the “job growth” in the U.S. that Obama brags about is minimum- or low-wage jobs. According to the organizing director of the Service Employees International Union, low-wage jobs are “the fastest growing jobs in the U.S.” A report by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors indicated that low-wage jobs include “food service workers, security guards, janitors and gardeners, cleaners, home health aides, child care workers, hairdressers and beauticians, and recreation occupations,” and “maids and porters, call-center workers, bank tellers, data-entry keyers, cooks, food preparation workers, waiters and waitresses, cashiers and pharmacy assistants, parking-lot attendants, hotel receptionists and clerks, ambulance drivers, poultry, fish and meat processors, sewing-machine operators, laundry and dry-cleaning operators, and agricultural workers.”
These jobs are not just a way for teenagers to earn some cash—they are not marginal to the functioning of the capitalist-imperialist economy. They are deeply integrated into and play a vital role in the overall functioning and profitability of capitalism-imperialism.
Changes and developments in the global imperialist economy have contributed to and accelerated changes within the U.S. economy. Millions of people worldwide have been pulled directly into the vortex of capitalist production, under brutally horrific conditions: young women in garment sweatshops in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines... youths in China working endless hours making products for Walmart and other Western outlets... farm workers who have been driven off their land in Mexico and now picking produce that winds up in U.S. grocery stores and restaurants.
This heightened globalization of production and the ongoing “outsourcing” of many industrial jobs; rapid developments in technological innovation that have impacted all levels of production, transportation, distribution, and communication worldwide; and a global assault on wages and living standards—all this has been shaped by intense competition between blocs of imperialist capital and imperialist countries. All this has meant even greater horrors and misery for billions of people in countries around the world oppressed and dominated by the U.S. and other imperialist powers. And it has driven the growth of low-wage jobs in the U.S. and the increasing poverty among growing numbers of people.
Democrats—and Dead-Ends
The November 10 demonstrations were timed to be one year before the next presidential election. A major theme of protest organizers was “come get my vote.” Leading protest organizers said that this appeal was “non-partisan”—not aimed at either Democrats or Republicans. But in fact the Democratic Party was a key force behind the protests’ themes, and leading Democrats, such as New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, spoke at some of the events.
Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and other Democratic Party leaders have indicated support for the demand to raise the federal minimum wage. Meager concessions have been made in some places to the struggles people have waged for years to raise the minimum wage. Seattle and San Francisco have a $15 minimum wage. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said he is pushing measures to raise the minimum wage for all state workers.
The top Democrats are not supporting a rise in the minimum wage out of any benevolence or real concern for people’s well-being. Coming from the outlook and interests of powerful forces in the ruling class, they are deeply concerned that the widening gap between rich and poor could give rise to even wider and more intense social conflict. Tens of millions of people in this “greatest of all societies” are becoming increasingly impoverished, with little or no prospect of their lives getting any better for them. This is one very sharp expression of the utter worthlessness of a system based upon relentless exploitation.
People like Clinton and Sanders aim to mollify some of the extreme edges of income inequality, not end capitalist exploitation. They hope to channel the widespread simmering anger and discontent at the inequities of U.S. society into the dead-end of support for the Democrats.
An Outmoded System
Capitalism is completely outmoded and a detriment to humanity; it can’t in any way meet the needs of the masses of people. Human potential will be twisted and crushed, and the lives of tens and hundreds of millions of people will be destroyed and sucked dry as long as this system dominates the planet. It needs to be overcome, through an actual revolution, as soon as possible, everywhere on Earth.
The ruthless exploitation faced by low-wage workers is an expression of the actual workings of capitalism. The struggle people are waging to improve their living conditions and raise their wages is righteous, and can be an important component of mounting resistance and opposition to the savage injustices and inequalities of the system of capitalism.
In today’s world the production of things, and the distribution of the things produced, is overwhelmingly carried out by large numbers of people who work collectively and are organized in highly coordinated networks. At the foundation of this whole process is the proletariat, an international class which owns nothing, yet has created and works these massive socialized productive forces. These tremendous productive powers could enable humanity to not only meet the basic needs of every person on the planet, but to build a new society, with a whole different set of social relations and values...a society where all people could truly and fully flourish together.
Capitalism Is Destroying the Environment and Can Never Cure the Problem: What Is It Going to Take?
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
November 9, 2015. A World to Win News Service. The following is by the Revolutionary Communist Manifesto Group (Europe).
The environmental crisis is taking alarming proportions in the world today. Scientists warn that the rising temperature of the planet due to high levels of carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels as well as other greenhouse gases threaten to destabilise whole ecosystems, with devastating potential consequences for life on the planet as we know it. From destroying rainforests and coral reefs and depleting entire species to over-fishing the oceans and shifting land use away from food needs and consuming the Earth’s resources at galloping speed, together with the increasingly polluted air, poisoned groundwater and soil and much more. Who and what is responsible and who suffers most of the burden in this horrifically uneven world?
This Revolution special issue focuses on the environmental emergency that now faces humanity and Earth's ecosystems. In this issue we show:
the dimensions of the emergency...
the source of its causes in the capitalist system, and the impossibility of that system solving this crisis...
a way out and way forward for humanity—a revolutionary society in which we could actually live as custodians of nature, rather than as its plunderers.
The human toll is also as deadly as it is highly unequal. The destruction of the environment is a global problem. But the human exploitation and destruction of lives and livelihoods connected to the massive environmental wreckage underway and to the ongoing plunder of resources are concentrated among the world’s poor and countries of the South (Latin America, Africa and Asia), dominated by the ‘‘North,’’ where imperialism is headquartered—its finance, the organisation of its production systems, and by far the Earth’s greatest resource consumers. The terrible impact of climate warming and rising sea levels hits the already vulnerable populations the hardest, and it is going to get worse: more tropical cyclones like the one in 2013 that took the lives of 10,000 people in the Philippines, higher temperatures and worse flooding that every year washes away peasant food crops and kills thousands in Pakistan and Bangladesh, while desertification and rising heat shrink the arable land of farmers in the Sahel countries. So why aren’t the sustainability and preservation of the Earth in everyone’s interest? If we all want future generations to lead healthy lives and continue to enjoy nature, why can’t the ruling classes of the world agree on this one thing and take measures to stop it? Why can’t scientists’ knowledge, all the good intentions and awareness campaigns make it right? Why can’t we just cut back our personal consumption and hope that reason will prevail to reverse what capitalism’s recklessness has destroyed?
Capitalism is not only the cause of the resource massacre, the threat to the world’s ecosystems, climate destabilisation and the resulting impact on life on Earth; it cannot and will not offer any real or lasting solution. Why not? For capitalism, nature is seen as nothing more than an instrument to exploit and to fuel a certain type of growth, with little consideration for environmental and social need. It is the inner workings and logic of the system themselves that drive capitalists to carry out cutthroat competition in search of the highest profitability, rooted in the production of commodities. The main industries in the world driving the others and fighting for an edge over their rival producers depend on fossil fuels that also sustain cheap production. Environmental degradation and damage, loss of resources and ecosystems are not part of the capitalists’ calculation... and those costs and damage become the burden of society and the world.
Even in developing green sources of energy, everything the captains of industry do makes things worse: burning down Indonesian rainforests for palm oil has a global impact. With the Mozambican government’s complicity, multinationals force peasants off their land or to convert to industrial production of jatropha (biofuel), which later is scrapped as not sufficiently marketable. In fact, the market tunnel vision of capitalist industries and states cannot view each new environmental problem as anything other than potential investment, whether for ecosystem services and marketing, dumping, or “clean-up” practices.
Capitalism-imperialism functions as a system, under capitalist political rule. These states cannot and will not represent either the interests of the people in changing the world on all levels or protecting or seriously repairing the planet the system is bleeding and destroying. Imperialist states are also central to organising the control over key energy sources for waging geostrategic political and military rivalry. The U.S. military is the single largest institutional oil consumer in the world.
All the political debate and meetings that acknowledge the environmental crisis and establish conventions to reduce greenhouse gases; laws against deforestation and limits on ocean fishing; that expose the tar sands debacle and issue UN reports warning of the dire global situation cannot lead to any serious or unified action, despite the fact we live in one integrated world. Regulation and “responsible investment” are not a solution. Capitalists and willing governments trample conventions every single day. Toxic e-waste is still shipped to Africa in the form of ‘‘donating computers.’’ The Arctic melt is far away from the stock exchanges in the world’s capitals, where ‘‘counter-experts’’ are paid to cast doubt on the real dangers. What kind of perverted system argues for “emissions trading” to allow big, rich polluting countries like the U.S. to buy the “right to pollute” from less developed economies?!
A radical approach is needed—and this means revolution.
Revolution means a completely different path of social development not based on the narrow interests of the imperialists. A revolution carried out by the oppressed and proletariat acting in the interests of humanity as a whole and conceiving of and acting upon the reality of the natural world as a whole. Socialist revolutions, wherever power is seized, can with this perspective set global standards and begin to repair the immense damage to the environment. They can take steps required to put an end to the pollution-intensive, cheap labor, global manufacturing grids of production. This will be linked to planning and regulating growth—what is produced and how—the only way to protect and preserve a variety of ecosystems and prevent today’s environmental crisis from moving towards collapse. Revolution will mobilise the knowledge of science across the world, as well as the conscious activity of the people themselves to implement sweeping change. Socialist revolution must restructure industrial and agricultural production as well as transport, and replace fossil fuels they depend on with renewable energy sources. Wind, solar and other forms of power can be further developed, unhindered by the logic of capitalism. Food needs can be met on the basis of long-term land use planning, biodiversity and protection of ecosystems, developing many of the green initiatives, technologies and knowledge that weren’t available to past socialist revolutions as well as discovering new ones. With a communist perspective, socialist revolution will lead people to work to develop the health of the planet for future generations, to build a different culture not based on consumerist values, as part of one world, one Earth and one humanity that has a common interest in a very different, a radically different, social future and overcoming the huge gap between oppressed and oppressor countries. This other world is possible, but it requires revolution.
Socialist revolutions of the 20th century such as in Mao’s China made huge advances based on mobilising the consciousness of humans to change society, including measures to counter environmental destruction and plan for the future; yet in the drive for rapid industrialisation to improve people’s lives these initiatives were far from sufficient. With an understanding of these shortcomings and scientific advances since then we can and must do much better next time.
We have to urgently step up today’s struggles against the massive environmental crimes being committed now that under this system will only increase in magnitude. And we must just as urgently link the growing environmental movement to building a movement for real revolution. We who are revolted at the state of the planet and where it is headed must get beyond the more comforting illusions that capitalism can be ‘‘greened’’ and made to work for humanity. We need to take up the challenge of revolution, our only chance to create a sustainable and liberating society and planet.
A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine, a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.
Border Patrol Agents Get Away with Murder!
Justice for Anastasio Hernández Rojas!
November 13, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The U.S. Justice Department announced on November 6 that no federal charges would be brought against any of the Border Patrol agents who murdered Anastasio Hernández Rojas five years ago while in their custody. Anastasio was 42, and had lived in San Diego for more than a decade with his wife and his five U.S.-born children when he was killed.
May 28, 2010, Anastasio was detained with his brother in San Diego after entering the U.S. illegally. Depositions in the civil lawsuit said they cooperated, but during their processing, Anastasio was injured by a kick from an agent. He asked for medical care, and an immigration hearing. Instead the supervisor decided he should be “voluntarily returned” to Mexico—by forcing him through the entry gate. The agents claim he resisted this deportation; and they attacked him brutally.
While handcuffed and hogtied, lying on the ground barely moving, yelling for help, he was beaten bloody by border agents, while they repeatedly said “stop resisting.” A dozen other agents stood by watching. People on the bridge at San Ysidro border crossing had been recording the inhumane beating of Rojas. So when they were finished, the killers went to the bridge and confiscated the cell phones of people who’d witnessed it, and erased their videos of the murder.
The coroner ruled Hernández Rojas’ death a homicide. His examination found he had died of a heart attack after sustaining massive injuries from the beating: “bruising to his chest, stomach, hips, knees, back, lips, head and eyelids; five broken ribs; and a damaged spine.” Despite these findings, including one video of the assault, no charges were filed.
But in 2012 a second video appeared. One woman on the bridge had hidden her cell phone when the agents took the others. She held it for two years out of fear, because it showed a man being killed. The video was aired in 2012 in a PBS report. This video clearly contradicted key evidence and testimony of the agents who killed Anastasio.
The uproar needed to be dealt with on another level, so the Justice Department stepped in. It wasn’t until over five years after the killing of Hernández Rojas that the Justice Department issued their verdict—that there was no evidence that could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hernández Rojas had been murdered.
In their press release the Department of Justice wrote “a team of experienced federal prosecutors determined that the evidence was insufficient to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges,” because they couldn’t prove that the Border Patrol agents had acted willfully, “with the specific intent to deprive the victim of a constitutional right.”
To which it must be said: a system where there is no right for someone not doing anything wrong to live—and to not be brutally, sadistically, tortured and murdered by a mob of police—is a system and constitution that needs to be swept away with revolution and replaced with a whole different system (and constitution) where this can never happen.
And why couldn’t they bring even a manslaughter charge against any of the agents, where they merely have to charge that the federal agents “committed a lawful act in an unlawful manner, or without due caution and circumspection, that might produce death?” Because “the federal agents’ action were not done without due caution and circumspection.” Think about this: the bloody murder of a human being while restrained represents, in the eyes of the U.S. Department of Justice, the use of due caution and circumspection. What does that say about the role that the in-justice system plays, at all levels, in exonerating those they have given the monopoly to use violence against the people?
The lawyer for the family in the civil lawsuit went on to point out: “They waited until the statute of limitations ran on charging the officers with civil rights violations or assault. They waited five years, and when all that was left was murder charges, decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone with murder.” This is yet another example of the point that Bob Avakian has made: “Yes, there’s a conspiracy, to get the cops off.”
Hundreds of people demonstrated their anger in San Diego the night of the announcement of the exoneration of the killer Border Patrol agents. Maria Puga, wife of Hernández Rojas, said about the decision: “How can we believe in the government if they cannot deliver justice. From the beginning, it seemed like the investigation favored the agents; they got away with murder.” Anastasio’s mother said: “This is not justice. It seems like justice is only for the wealthy and not for the poor... The say that no one is responsible for the death of my son, but they are responsible. The agents that beat him, electrocuted him, and choked him are responsible.” And his brother Bernardo said: “If someone hits a dog, they get charged. These agents killed my brother, but nothing will happen to them. That is not right. Where is the justice?”
Interview with Nate Hamilton, Brother of Dontre Hamilton
"We're on the side of righteousness, we're on the side of truth, and we are going to fight back"
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
At the end of a meeting of the Coalition for Justice in Milwaukee, Nathaniel Hamilton (Nate) spent a few minutes talking with Revolution newspaper about the recent decision of the Department of IN-justice not to file charges against the cop who murdered Dontre Hamilton, Nate’s brother, in April 2014. This was a case of a 31-year-old man having his life brutally stolen by a cop simply for sleeping on a park bench while Black and while mentally ill. The first minute or so of this brief interview was lost. In that segment, Nate reiterated what he said in his press conference after the decision—that his family is angry and disgusted, but they had expected nothing good, and that they will keep fighting. He made a strong point that morality—what’s right—needs to be higher than the law. He said at the press conference, “I will show a constant display of disgust with every form of law enforcement that doesn’t get it right,” and “I say destroy the whole Constitution, because it never worked to begin with for Black people.” The family of Dontre Hamilton participated in Rise Up October in New York City.
Revolution: We at Revolution newspaper really appreciated your statement about destroying the U.S. Constitution because it never worked for Black people. Another thing you said that really struck home was if another Black man dies, then all Black people, Brown people, women—everyone should come out of their houses and hit the streets, and not sleep, and keep going until this stops. I think this really captures the spirit of Stop Mass Incarceration.
Nate Hamilton: We’re restless. We have to be restless toward fighting injustice, and how can we sleep when injustice is still alive and well? And I think that if you feel that connection and that passion for human life, that you respect all life, Black life, Brown life, Italian life, whatever life that may be, if you respect that life, then if you fail to do anything, then you’re just as responsible. And then that goes back to revolution. What side are you on? Are you on the side of the oppressor, or are you on the side of the oppressed? And right now, if you’re on the side of the oppressor, then you’re asking for a battle amongst the poor, and to fight against the poor is to fight against passion, is to fight against the people who have been down so long.
Protest against the official decision not to charge the cop who killed Dontre Hamilton, Milwaukee, December 23, 2014. Photo: Special to revcom.us
So to fight against the person who has the odds stacked against them—I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t go against someone that has nothing to lose. And we are a people that has nothing to lose. And that’s what people need to realize. At this point in life we have nothing to lose. We have nothing to be ashamed of. They have already did all they can possibly do against us. And we cannot allow that to continue. But we know that we have been able to wake up every day knowing what we’ve been through. And I’m just telling people to get up out your homes. Don’t allow the system to run you anymore. We as people are supposed to run the system. We are supposed to have dominion over our land; not people having dominion over the people. And right now you see a system that’s been playing control over the population of the U.S., and until we say no more, until we say that we’re going to start punching and kicking back, they are going to continually think they can throw hard blows.
But I believe that if we come out our house we can throw a harder blow, by economically withdrawing, by being as aggravating and as demanding and as irritating to this Constitution, this system, to this belief, of what America looks like. Because we know what they say it’s supposed to look like, and we know what it really looks like. And we the people, it’s our time now to stand up and take our street back, to take our children’s education back, to take our loved ones out of jail for senseless crimes that they shouldn’t be in jail for. We have so much work to do. It starts with us.
Revolution: Your mother, Maria Hamilton, really expressed “what side are you on” tonight when she said she’s done, she’s through, if you don’t get behind these families, not just hers but every family that’s lost a loved one, then she’s done with you.
Nate Hamilton: You have to be both, you have to separate yourself from ignorance. And if you don’t separate yourself from it then you become a part of it.
Revolution: Is there anything in particular that you picked up from participating in Rise Up October that you can apply going forward?
Nate Hamilton: I’ve learned... it was a very strong weekend in New York. And just the commitment of people, just the willingness to get out there in the thousands to be demanding, to be boisterous, to be resistant, was something that I long for here in this city. What happened there and the families coming together was amazing. I think people need to see that. More people need to see that kind of commitment. To see that families all around the nation are tired, are willing to go into the streets, to risk arrest, to go beyond and above—any means to get justice for their children, and to prevent the injustice not just for their children, but for others’ children. We can’t get our babies and our brothers and our sons back, but what we can do, we can prevent our city from demolishing our nation, our Black and Brown families, by getting out here and putting up a resistance. By saying that we are no longer on the side of the oppressor, but we’re on the side of righteousness, we’re on the side of truth, and that we are going to fight back. We’re going to shut down, disrupt, and dismantle any system that gets in our way in our fight.
From Prairie View, Texas, to NYC—to Stop Police Brutality
November 16, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The following is a thank you letter written by a student at Prairie View A&M University in Texas who went to NYC for the Rise Up October demonstrations (see coverage at revcom.com). She wrote it to thank the many donors who sponsored her and two students for the trip to NYC.
Dear Friends,
“From Prairie View to NYC, to stop police brutality.” I first would like to start off with a special thanks to all that made it possible for my sister, friend and I to go to this historical venture. Most people feel that one push in the grand scheme of things is like dust in the wind or one more straw placed in the haystack that contains the needle making it more impossible to find, but what they fail to see is the other side. That in fact rather than being that one that makes it impossible, they have the potential to be the one that starts a chain reaction, the straw that broke the camel’s back or the one dust particle that triggered a landslide. In other words, together we can be something greater and every piece creates a stronger whole.
While on the trip, the gravity of the situation intensified. Hearing from the families especially as well as seeing the diversity of the participants made its mark. From the Native American man speaking of how the founding fathers have slaughtered his people in order to make way for this society to Eve Ensler calling on “[her] white brothers and sisters” to make a stance. These in particular struck my heart.
As a Black woman and student, I realized that my personal preoccupation with the struggle of fighting for equality for women and the Black community is not enough. I had not even thought about the Native Americans who have been and still are being discriminated against, equal to if not more so than the Black community.
Being able to attend this event was truly life changing as well as historical. I am grateful that you all made it possible for me and a few other Prairie View students to support and make a stance at Rise Up October 24th 2015 NYC.
Authorities Greasing Skids to Exonerate Tamir's Murderers!
by Carl Dix
October 11, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The prosecutor's release of reports that say the actions of the cops who gunned down Tamir Rice were justified is a blatant step toward exonerating the cops who murdered Tamir. The question is: what are we going to do about this?
We must condemn these reports as the ignorant pig talk they are. And if they go ahead and let these killer cops get off without charges, we must take to the streets with great determination to deliver a message that we refuse to accept the system backing up its cops when they murder Black people. And this is one more reason why everybody who wants to STOP the terror police spread in Black and Latino neighborhoods has to be in NYC for #RiseUpOctober.
Carl Dix at the October 24 Rally: “Let’s do all that we can to stop the horror of police murdering our people. And then let’s do even more because we gotta stop this.
The following is a rush transcript.
Okay, Okay. You have seen the faces of the lives that have been stolen by the police. Beautiful lives that were cut down too short. This is unacceptable and our demand is very simple: police terror, police murder must stop. Not be reduced a little bit. Must stop!
Now sometimes people say well, your demand needs to be more concrete than that, Carl. So let me give you a concrete demand:
Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!
[chanting with crowd:]
Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!
One more time.
Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!
Now look, that’s a simple and just demand. But we need to be very clear that when we raise that demand we gotta fight for it. Because there is a whole system that’s behind those killer cops. It ain’t just a few killer cops on the beat with some rogue DAs, or corrupt DAs, district attorneys. It’s a whole system all the way up to the top, that arrested people en masse when we protested these killings over this last year, that demonizes our people, especially the young people to try to justify these murders.
Now when I say that, some people might be thinking, well wait a minute Carl, didn’t Obama say he was going to do something about this a couple of days ago? Didn’t he say that he supports Black Lives Matter? Well, let’s be clear. The Obama who said something about Black Lives Matter six months ago said that the youth of Baltimore were thugs and criminals when they rose up in response to the police murder of Freddie Grey. So let’s not get twisted by that. He’s trying to rope us back in. He also said along with saying I’m gonna do something, it has to be incremental. Now what does that mean? It’s gotta be small, slow steps to change things. That ain’t going to cut it. This has got to stop. We don’t want no small reduction of the people they warehouse in prison or the people that they kill. We want it stopped.
And look, we are going to fight to make that happen. Ain’t no body going to do it for us. And we are doing that today. We’ve been doing that this week. Thursday, No More Stolen Lives/Say Their Name. Thursday afternoon, march and rally for the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality. Yesterday, some of us put our bodies on the line to pose the demand, Shut Down Rikers Island—that debtors’ prison and torture chamber. And that’s what we’re doing to do today and we’re going to keep doing that.
October 24: Voices of Loved Ones of People Murdered by Police
Before and after the Rise Up October march through NYC on October 24, dozens of family members and other loved ones of people murdered by police shared the terrible loss they suffered, the outrage of lives stolen by police, and their solidarity with all victims of police murder. And over and over they declared their determination to continue to fight for justice—for their own loss, and to STOP all police terror. Following are just a few of those voices.
Lsana D’Jahspora is the father of Cinque “Q” D’Jahspora, killed by Jackson, Tennessee police, on November 6, 2014: Remember the name: Cinque, we called him Q. Q is here today I guarantee you. This young man’s spirit was connected to mine even before he was born, and trust me, he is here. Cinque was gunned down—I say executed—in Jackson, Tennessee, just three months after Mike Brown. Lying on the ground, face down, and shot in the back. And not only that, Cinque caused so little threat these cops actually went to the car and then came back and shot him—in the back. You can see the execution on video. But even until this day they are in denial. They have even lied about the cop who fired the shot, this is how layered the conspiracy is, the cover-up. So I say to you families, I’m glad to be part of this justice train. I will go anywhere to stand with any family, but bring this justice train to the plantation in Jackson, Tennessee. Those of you who can, November 6 is the one-year anniversary. We got to take this train all around the country, but come to the plantation, because we need you there brothers. It’s as bad as it was in the fifties and sixties.
Yolanda McNair, mother of Adaisha Miller, killed by an off-duty Detroit cop at a party at his house, July 2012: No investigation into my daughter’s death. And they waited 25 minutes to call 911. They never checked him for alcohol or drugs. They stopped short of saying she shot herself. She had no gunshot wounds on her. She was shot in her lungs and it went through her heart. I don’t think her going out that night to celebrate her life, her upcoming birthday, was her plan to end up dead. The last thing I told her was that I loved her. And I thank God that I got to hear her say ‘I love you’ back because I gotta keep that, I gotta remember that, for the rest of my life. But I’m here to fight for my daughter. I’m here to fight for everybody’s child, parent, and grandchild. I’ll be their voice. I’m gonna be here. And the police officer in Detroit who killed my daughter, I will be there when you go down too.
Venus Anderson, mother of Christopher Anderson, shot to death by Highland Park, Illinois, police in the hospital, November 3, 2014: My son was shot down in an emergency room by the Highland Park police station. Now my story might be a little bit different from y’alls considering my son did have a weapon on him, but it took them about two-and-a-half hours to realize he was armed. My son never pulled a gun out on the police. He was in the hospital for two-and-a-half hours before they discovered he had a gun on him. My son went walking through the hallway with his hands in the air saying ‘Don’t shoot, I surrender.’ They put him back in a room and gave him forty-four seconds to put the gun down before opening fire on him, in 1.7 seconds, nine bullets at my son in a small closed in room in a curtain. My son was shot in cold blood. He fell over off the bed, and while his body was dead, they put handcuffs on him. And when they rolled him over, ladies and gentlemen, the gun was still beneath him indicating he never pulled a weapon on the police. This is injustice. So whether they have a gun or not, you have to look at the circumstances. My son didn’t deserve to die that way, like none of your family, none of your kids deserved to die like this. We pay the police to serve and protect us, they are no longer hiding behind white sheets, ladies and gentlemen, they are hiding behind their shields. These are the new age police. Let’s shut em down!
Thousands in the Streets of NYC for #RiseUpOctober:
STOP POLICE TERROR! Which Side Are You On?
October 24, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us | More to come, check back...
Revolution/revcom.us greatly appreciates the many photos, videos and reports we received of Rise Up October. While we may not be able to post all of them we really encourage people to keep sending us these valuable contributions.
See coverage below.
Rise Up October, October 24, 2015, New York City. The front of the march. Photo: Erik McGregor
Carl Dix speaking at Washington Square Park. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
Cornel West speaking at Washington Square Park. Photo: Phil Buehler
#SAYHERNAME contingent. The #SAYHERAME campaign documents women murdered by police. Photo: Cindy Trinh/Activists of New York
Jivonte Lee Davis, a close friend of Tony Robinson who was killed by the Madison police on March 5, 2015. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
Justus Howell was killed by police in Zion, Illinois, April 14, 2015. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
Eve Ensler, Carl Dix, Cornel West, Quentin Tarantino, on march with family members. Photo: twitter.com/tuneintorevcom
"Ferguson is in the House"—Contingent of Ferguson and St. Louis activists marched on October 24.
Members from Stop Mass Incarceration, San Francisco/Bay Area, CA. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
Revolution Club contingent, made up of members from around the country. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
En route from Washington Square Park to Bryant Park. Photo: Oscar Diaz @oscmdiaz
Artwork contributed to Rise Up October
Artwork contributed to Rise Up October
Photo: Cindy Trinh/Activists of New York
The Audre Lorde Project demanding justice for Yvonne McNeil, a homeless lesbian, murdered by the NYPD in October 2011. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Harlem, New York. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
Youth and others take the message to Times Square. Police attacked, and arrested six people. Photo: twitter.com/StopMassIncNet
Huge, beautiful portraits of people killed by the prison system and prison authorities were were contributed to Rise Up October by French street artist/photographer JR as part of his #insideoutproject-A Global Art Project. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
South Bronx Community Congress. Photo: Revolution/revcom.us
Columbia University students. Photo: Noel Altaha @ngaltaha
Demanding justice for Justus Howell and all victims of police murder
October 24:
Thousands in the Streets of NYC for #RiseUpOctober:
STOP POLICE TERROR! Which Side Are You On?
Thousands took to the streets of Manhattan today to demand STOP Police Terror. And to pose to the world: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? The march was the culmination of three days of Rise Up October. The people were fired up with righteous determination. This is a beginning snapshot of what happened.
Carl Dix led the crowd chanting, “I am a revolutionary!” Cornel West challenged people: “When you love folks you hate that they’re being mistreated!” Eve Ensler declared “I am tired of living in a country where state violence has created a terror state for Black and Brown people, it is unacceptable!” Between the beginning and end of the march, scores of family members and representatives of victims of police murder shared their pain and outrage and challenged everyone to fight. They led the march. People defied police attacks that seized five people near the end of the march, and six more youth out of a group of a couple hundred youth and others who took the message into Times Square. The marchposed to the world: Which Side Are You On?
A contingent carried posters of women murdered by police and prison authorities—#SAY HER NAME!Faces of those murdered by police were everywhere, on signs and banners—calling out for justice and an END to the horror. Unitarians demanded JUSTICE and LGBT activists called out sadistic police brutality that targets trans people. There was a striking mix of all nationalities, and representatives of people around the world. There was a sea of signs: RISE UP! STOP POLICE TERROR! The Revolution Club manifested fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution. A chant erupted up and down 6th Avenue: “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell.”
Students came from around the country—from the Truman State SDS chapter in Missouri to students from California to Prairie View A&M University in Texas. They came from Sarah Lawrence College, and Hofstra University’s NAACP chapter. A grad student and teacher told Revolution, “They’re killing my students with slow genocide.” Youth and others came from the communities of the oppressed, from the East, South and Midwest as well as from NYC. An example: a contingent from Waukegan, IL representing the struggle for justice for Justus Howell and for all victims of police murder.
Unitarian-Universalists came from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a contingent marched from the Holy Ghost Upper Room Filling Station Ministry in the oppressed community of Jamaica, Queens. St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Manhattanville, NYC carried a banner that declared, “We are not afraid!” Film director, Quentin Tarantino spoke: “When I see murder I cannot stand by.”
At the end of the march Carl Dix declared “You should feel good about what you did but not so good you’re ready to go home, pat yourself on the back, and go back to normal, because normal is the police murdering people, especially Black and Latino and Native people. We have been acting to stop it and it goes forward from today.”
Shipping now. Order the book here.
Quentin Tarantino at the rally. Photo: Phillip Buehler
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Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old playing in a park who was gunned down by police in Cleveland, Ohio on November 22, 2014. 
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