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Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

"But How Do We Know Who's Telling the Truth About Communism?"

November 18, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Some people reading this interview may be saying to themselves: "Ok, Raymond Lotta says these socialist societies were incredibly liberating, and that all these amazing things happened. But my teacher... my textbook... that magazine article I read... my friend whose family is from Russia... everything I have ever learned or heard about these societies... says that they were nightmares. How do we know who's telling the truth? Why should I believe Raymond Lotta?"

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In response, two quick points must be made right away:  

First, it's not a question of what Raymond Lotta says vs. what your teacher, or textbook, or friend, or magazine article says. There are not two, or three, or four different competing "versions" of reality; there is one reality. In other words: Either something is true, or it's not. Either something is in line with reality, or it isn't. Either something happened, or it didn't.

Second, here's how you definitely don't decide what's true: By looking at what most people think. Very often what most people think is wrong! For example: At different points in the history of the world, most people thought that the earth was flat... that the sun revolved around the earth... and that slavery was completely natural and acceptable... and most people today still think that god created human beings and all life on earth. 0 for 4!

But then this leads to the question: How do we tell what is really true, and who is really telling the truth about communism?

The short answer to this question is: Be scientific. Examine the evidence, and examine the methods and criteria being applied.

More specifically: Examine the evidence being offered, and criteria and methods being applied, in this interview with Raymond Lotta to argue that the past experience of the communist revolution was principally emancipatory... and compare and contrast this with the evidence (or lack thereof) being offered, and criteria and methods being applied, by those who tell you communism was a nightmare.

There is a basic question that you should ask yourself again and again as you read this interview and compare it to everything you've heard and been told and will again encounter about communism: Who is proceeding scientifically here, and who is not?

Now, what does it mean to be scientific, or to proceed scientifically? And why is this important? Being scientific means starting from, and consistently returning to, reality. It means doing that as opposed to starting from conventional wisdom, what one wants to be true, what one subjectively "feels," or one's prejudices and preconceptions about what is true.  

As Bob Avakian has put it:

Let's not mystify science. Science means that you probe and investigate reality, by carrying out experiments, by accumulating data, and so on; and then, proceeding from that reality and applying the methods and logic of rational thought, you struggle to identify the patterns in the data, etc. you've gathered about reality. If you're approaching it correctly, you're struggling to arrive at a correct synthesis of the reality you've investigated. And then you measure your conclusions against objective reality to determine if they are in correspondence with it, if what they sum up and predict about reality is confirmed in reality. That's the way breakthroughs in science have been made—whether it's in the realm of biology, like the understanding of evolution, or whether it's things about the origins of the universe (or the known universe), like the Big Bang Theory, or whatever. That's the process that goes on, and the question is: is it scientific? That is, does it, in its main and essential lines, correspond to reality?

—From What Humanity Needs: Revolution, and the New Synthesis of Communism, An Interview with Bob Avakian by A. Brooks

And why is it so important to be scientific? Because this is the only way to actually get to reality and to continue learning more about reality. To return to the examples given earlier: where would we be if Copernicus and Galileo, or Darwin, or the Abolitionists who fought against slavery, proceeded from "what everybody knows," or decided that no one could really say what was true, or what was right and wrong, that there was no objective reality but simply "different versions" of that reality, or that truth depended on one's individual perspective?

Now, to be clear, the point is not that if someone is applying a scientific method—and the communist method of dialectical materialism in particular—that automatically means everything that person says about communism is true, or that everything anti-communists say is not true. In fact, at the heart of the new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian is an understanding that while the communist outlook and method represents the most systematic, comprehensive, and consistent means of arriving at the truth, this does not mean that communists have a monopoly on the truth, or that those who are not applying this outlook and method are incapable of discovering important truths. Rather, with anything that anyone says, the test should be: Does this, in fact, correspond to reality?

But it is also the case that with this interview, as is the case with literally anything that one reads about any topic, everyone who reads this is not going to be able to independently verify every single statement made or fact cited. And if you just look things up for yourself, without an eye towards all the points being made above, you are—to be blunt—going to run across a lot of lies and bullshit and unsubstantiated garbage about communism and not know what to make of it.

So, again, as you are reading this interview with Raymond Lotta and comparing it to everything you've been told about communism, consider the question: Who is proceeding scientifically here? And who is not?   

Let's Take Just One Example

Let's compare and contrast how Raymond Lotta discusses the Great Leap Forward in revolutionary China with how a recent New York Times article—which is representative of the standard anti-communist account of this experience—approaches the Great Leap Forward.

If you read how Raymond Lotta talks about the Great Leap Forward in this interview, you will notice that he consistently applies the method of proceeding from, confronting and probing reality, and the complexity and contradiction within that reality. He starts by talking about the context—the situation within China and the world as a whole—in which the Great Leap Forward was launched. He addresses the challenges Mao and the Chinese revolution were faced with, and the problems and obstacles they were trying to solve and overcome. He addresses the basic question of why Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward and what its goals were. He speaks to what the Great Leap Forward accomplished. And he does not shy away from, but rather directly engages and refutes, the anti-communist accusations that "Mao was responsible for tens of millions of deaths" through the Great Leap Forward, illuminating where these charges and figures come from and exposing how anti-communists both inflate the numbers of deaths and also treat the deaths that did occur as people "killed by Mao." And in terms of the massive food crisis that hit China, Lotta does not attempt to cover up or shy away from this, instead explaining the various actual causes of this food crisis, the mistakes that the Chinese leadership made, and the ways that this leadership learned from and corrected these mistakes. And the basic criteria Lotta is applying to evaluate all of this is: To what degree were the Chinese communists seeking to—and to what degree did they—advance in the direction of overcoming all exploitation and oppression and the ways of thinking that go along with that?

It is very instructive to compare and contrast how Lotta approaches the Great Leap Forward in this interview with how it is approached in the New York Times article, "Milder Accounts of Hardships Under Mao Arise as His Birthday Nears" (October 16, 2013). In contrast to the interview with Raymond Lotta, which is consistently proceeding from, probing, and synthesizing the lessons of reality, the Times piece is proceeding from and returning to what "everybody knows."

The tone for this article is set in its opening sentence, which claims: "The famine that gripped China from 1958 to 1962 is widely judged to be the deadliest in recorded history, killing 20 to 30 million people or more, and is one of the defining calamities of Mao Zedong's rule." Right there, you have a combination of at least three standard anti-communist methods in a single sentence. 1) Toss out a huge number of deaths without offering any actual evidence for the claim, which the Times never does in the article. 2) Be sure to blame those deaths on communist leaders—again, evidence not included. 3) Use phrases like "widely judged" to convey the impression that "everybody knows" the above two points to be true, thereby freeing you of the burden of having to offer any evidence.  

From there, in addition to putting forward snarky, distorted, and crude misrepresentations of what the Great Leap Forward was seeking to accomplish and the reasons it was launched—read how Raymond Lotta explains this in the interview, and then compare it to the Times' characterization—the basic method of the Times article is to lean on the "everybody knows" crutch over and over again, instead of offering any evidence or reality-based analysis to support its claims. For instance, the article refers to a mathematician, Sun Jingxian, whom the article says "asserts that most of the apparent deaths were a mirage of chaotic statistics: people moved from villages and were presumed dead, because they failed to register in their new homes." But the article never even attempts to show why what Sun says is inaccurate! Similarly, the Times refers to a book by Yang Songlin, whom the Times identifies as a "former official," who argues that the numbers of deaths in the Great Leap Forward have been severely inflated, and that the deaths that did occur were caused mainly by "bad weather, not bad policies." But again, there is not even an attempt by the Times to show why what Yang says is not true.

We are not commenting one way or another here on Sun Jingxian and Yang Songlin, or their specific claims and methods. Rather, we are pointing to the Times' methods here, which is to start with what "everybody knows," and then measure everything else against that, rather than actually probing and investigating reality and using that as the yardstick to measure what is true.

The method, and message, of the Times article is clear: When it comes to negative things about communism, if someone said it, it must be true. If someone didn't say it, say it now. And if it can be claimed that lots of people say it—well, all the better!

Pieces like this article, which again is one of many examples that could be given, train people to think that Mao sat around and said: "Hmm, how can I implement a policy that will cause the most people to starve?" Among the things you would never know from these anti-communist slanders and methods is that there was mass starvation and mass inequalities in China before the Chinese revolution; that Mao launched the Great Leap Forward with the aims of overcoming mass starvation and inequalities, radically transforming social and economic relations, and developing the Chinese economy in a way that would reduce, not widen, the gap between the cities and the countryside; that within 20 years of the Chinese revolution, everyone in China indeed had enough food to eat; and that the deaths that occurred in China during the Great Leap Forward were principally caused by a massive famine that gripped China as a result of the floods and drought that affected over half of its agricultural land, by hardships caused by the Soviet withdrawal of aid to China, and by mistakes that the Chinese leadership made in that context—NOT by some insane and evil plot by Mao to starve people!

Again, compare all this—and many other examples you will unfortunately encounter of anti-communist methods and accounts—to the evidence that Raymond Lotta presents and the methods and criteria that he applies, in this section of the interview, and in fact throughout the interview.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/dept-of-mistakenly-plundered-archives-china-scholar-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Department of Mistakenly Plundered Archives

China Scholar Claims New Crimes by Mao

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The following is the transcript of an address from Broadshtick McFarcemore given at last month’s Harvard symposium on the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in China. The Cultural Revolution was launched by Mao in 1966 against those in power who were determined to turn China back into a capitalist country—as they actually did after Mao died. Still, scholars in the decades since have labored mightily to bring to light how actually horrible the rule of Mao was. McFarcemore, who publishes nearly every issue, it sometimes seems, in the New York Review of Books, stands out in the field. Here is the verbatim presentation by McFarcemore given last month.

MC: Distinguished scholars, students, let me present the pre-eminent scholar at Harvard in the field of China studies, Mr. Broadshtick McFarcemore. [Great applause.]

McFarcemore: We’ve all known about Mao Zedong’s truly great crimes. His leadership of a revolution to do away with the centuries of backwardness and poverty, in which tens of millions routinely suffered starvation and disease, certainly ranks high among history’s horrors. After all, this revolution threatened the ability of the Western democracies and Japan to actually keep developing China in the rational direction that they had been. Oh yes, a few wars here and there, tens of millions of Chinese slaughtered—but these were minor flaws in an otherwise benevolent process. And beyond that, Mao developed a military doctrine and strategy in that so-called war of liberation which was used by other people who called themselves “oppressed” to break free of the very selfless and benevolent colonial rule of the West over the vast majority of the world. (Yes, I know that resources were plundered under colonialism and tens of millions perished in war and famine but, again, my friends—what about the suffering of the West in this process?)

Mao’s leadership in building socialism in China, which led to a doubling of the life expectancy in that country in 25 years, went up against the wise counsel of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which of course had only China’s interests at heart but were then forced by Mao to resort to sabotage, blockade, and threats of war to stop his plans. But perhaps Mao’s worst crime was leading millions and millions of people in a Cultural Revolution to actually prevent the seizure of power by those sensible leaders within the Chinese party who have now restored capitalism there and made it possible for at least a tiny minority to grow extremely rich and to experience the great benefits of capitalist development.

Now despite knowledge of these terrible crimes of Mao, too many people around the world still defend him. But last year, due to heroic work of scholars searching through archives in China, we learned of a crime planned by Mao so vast as to truly dwarf any of his other infamies. Through documents and the testimony of those who knew Mao, we have discovered that Mao had actually planned the invasion of entire other continents in the name of China’s destiny. He planned to wipe out the tens of millions of inhabitants of these continents through a combination of warfare and disease and to seize their lands forever. Then, on top of that, Mao planned to import tens of millions of Africans to work as literal slaves to develop the continents.

But that’s not all. Mao actually had a plan to hold the descendants of these slaves in bondage for 10 generations, draining their labor in unbelievably horrible conditions, and using violence, rape, mutilation, torture, and—where he felt it was needed—murder, to prevent them from rising up. Further, once these slaves had served their purposes, their descendants would be confined in isolated neighborhoods and often put into concentration camp-like prisons, by the millions. To those of you who doubt this evidence, we learned this from those who knew Mao or who at least say they met him or who, at the very least, in some cases, are highly reliable people whose cousin once talked to someone who told him that he saw Mao in a parade.

Boggle the mind though it may, this fiend further planned to use the wealth thereby ripped from these slaves to build China into an extremely powerful country, bragging that there would be a “Chinese century” in which China would enforce its rule through wars, invasions, and intimidation, and through using that military aggression to secure economic domination of the resources and labor of many other countries—indeed, so these archives tell us, domination over the vast majority of countries and nations throughout the world. Mao said that even if numerous wars against these smaller and weaker countries were necessary, and even if these wars killed hundreds of thousands and in some cases several millions of the people of these countries, including children, “it would”—in the words of Mao’s foreign minister—“be worth it.” In fact, Mao called for building the most massive nuclear arsenal in the world and claimed that China must be willing to threaten others with this arsenal and even risk the annihilation of the whole planet through nuclear war if their will were to be challenged. And this doesn’t even mention Mao’s plans to become the world’s biggest despoiler of the environment and to even have some of his main spokespeople deny there even was a problem.

Think of it! Has there ever been a more monstrous oppressor than this? Surely, anyone who could even dream of planning such a mind-numbing and shameful litany of horrors, let alone try to do it, is the worst... [looking offstage to emcee frantically signaling] what? You say my paper got switched? That these were not Mao’s plans but the actual reality of... where? Where?!?

Oh my goodness.

[Turning to audience.] Errrr... never mind.

—Toby O'Ryan

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Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Challenging the Anti-Communist LIES Told About the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Editors’ note: The 50th anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution begins on May 16. The Chinese revolution came to power in 1949 and brought about immense and liberatory changes. But by the mid-1960s, the revolution was facing the danger of being reversed. In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution to prevent the restoration of capitalism and to carry the revolution forward. On the occasion of the anniversary, the bourgeois rulers, reactionaries, and ideologues of the status quo will be stepping up their ideological offensive. The mainstream media are now beginning to pump out vicious anticommunist distortion—and so, too, in the universities. The recent program at the New School in New York City was an opening shot to spread lies and misrepresentations. But it became a two-sided affair!

From a member of the Revolution Club New York City:

This May 16 marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao Zedong and led by Mao and the revolutionary forces within the Communist Party of China. The New School in NYC held a program to mark this anniversary, with Professor Xu Youyu, a University in Exile Scholar at The New School for Social Research. Over 200 people attended. Prof. Xu Youyu is a former Red Guard (one of the youths who were mobilized during the Cultural Revolution in China) and so-called “expert of the Cultural Revolution.” The professor essentially came to denounce the Cultural Revolution, give his personal perspective on it, and to promote “constitutional democracy” as the ultimate solution to what he described as the “the horrors of communism.”

I went to the program along with Raymond Lotta and a couple of others to set the record straight.

Prof. Xu Youyu opened his presentation with the “HORROR” of the universities during the Cultural Revolution abolishing the entrance exams! He complained that life experience, including manual labor, was taken into account instead of just tests! The fact that the professor found this horrifying should have immediately tipped the audience off that this guy was summing some things up based only on his personal experience, his personal gripes, and frustrations. I mean, why else would anyone see this change as a negative thing!? For hundreds of years peasants had been denied education. They lived in conditions of horrific poverty, with young daughters being sold by their families in order to feed the remaining children, no access to health care, etc. During the Cultural Revolution it was recognized that there were still vast sections of the country that needed to be brought into things. Peasants and other poor and oppressed people were now being given an education, being exposed to a new liberating culture and new ideas, and overall they were being brought into the process of remaking society in extremely important and meaningful ways. The speaker acknowledged none of this.

The presentation continued to give a totally ahistorical perspective on the entire Cultural Revolution. Stats were given as to the “injuries, deaths, persecutions,” and images were shown of people who had been beaten up or publicly shamed; all without any context. The speaker gave no sense of what this revolution was all for, what the actual goals were, what caused the violence, if the violence and repression was actually the main character of things or not, whether the Party was actually calling for this or whether it was a result of some people using the revolution to take out revenge on others.

Another indication of the speaker’s personal frustrations was how he presented the whole campaign that sent students into the countryside to learn from and bring the revolution to the peasants. He explained how frustrating it was for him that the students and youth were able to ride the public transportation for free to go to the countryside because it caused such terrible traffic... GIVE ME A BREAK! This was something called for by Mao and the Party as part of bridging the gap between those who worked with their backs and those who worked with ideas; to bring much needed education and health care to the isolated countryside. And this was part of a whole revolution aimed at transforming world outlook and to enable the masses of people to more deeply and scientifically understand society and the world (an extremely important element of things, which the speaker failed to mention) and, yes, that needed to include the peasants in the countryside as well!

Thank goodness Raymond Lotta was in the audience to spit some truth! He spoke from the floor during the Q&A and immediately called out this anticommunist slander for what it was. He went on to say what the Cultural Revolution actually was—a real revolution within the revolution aimed at defeating new capitalist forces from taking things backwards, and continuing on the socialist road towards communism; how it involved hundreds of millions of people; and how it was one of the most liberating times in human history. He went on to ask why the professor had not addressed what the actual aims and objectives of the Cultural Revolution were and why he had “completely obliterated the accomplishments of the Cultural Revolution,” including by denying that it had succeeded for 10 years in preventing the restoration of capitalism—which is what happened after Mao’s death. Most of the audience didn’t even realize that China today, with all its vast networks of sweatshops and poverty alongside pockets of obscene “development” and wealth for a few, was the result of the overthrow of socialism and the reversal of everything Mao fought for. Raymond let people know that Bob Avakian has summed up and built on this revolutionary experience and forged a new synthesis of communism because the world still cries out for revolution. And he challenged the room to put the historical experience in perspective and pointed out that during the same period that Mao was leading the liberating Cultural Revolution to continue to overcome oppression and exploitation, the United States was carrying out a genocidal war that killed two million in Vietnam.

What was the response from the professor? He essentially sidestepped the substance of what Raymond raised, instead arguing that because he had been there personally, he knew best and that all that really mattered was his own personal experience.

In summing up the whole presentation, including the Q&A, the lack of a scientific method in approaching any of these questions really stood out. It is so incredibly irresponsible to look at a period in human history like this, where millions of people were making revolution and transforming all of society, and sum it up based on individual experience, or just personal opinions. There is too much at stake. It was good that quite a few people came up to talk to Raymond and others of us after the program. People have been lied to and they need to know the truth.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/how-trump-agitated-for-railroad-of-central-park-5-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

How Trump Agitated for the Railroad of the—Innocent!—Central Park 5

Donald Chump, the Lynch Mob Master

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Today, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president. Twenty-seven years ago, he was the chief agitator for a “legal” lynch mob.

On April 19, 1989, a white woman jogger was the victim of a vicious assault in Central Park. She was raped and brutalized so severely that she was in a coma for 12 days. It was a sickening crime in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes—about 80 percent of the time by someone the victim knows, often an intimate partner.

But the authorities’ response had nothing to do with stopping any of that. New York City police interrogated Black and Latino youths they had taken into custody that night for other incidents. They threatened them, lied to them, beat them, and deprived them of sleep, food, or contact with their parents or lawyers. Eventually several of the youths—as young as 14, traumatized, and just wanting to be able to go home to their parents —"confessed." These youths quickly renounced those coerced confessions. In spite of that, in spite of the lack of physical evidence of their involvement in this crime, and in spite of the fact that substantial physical evidence pointed to someone else, five of  them were quickly convicted, sentenced, and jailed. They became known as the Central Park 5.

In 2002, another man, a convicted serial rapist linked to the crime by substantial DNA evidence, confessed to being the sole attacker. After years of protest and struggle, and as the evidence used to convict them was exposed as lies concocted by the authorities, the New York District Attorney cleared the Central Park 5 of all charges. By that time, they had served their unjust sentences—40 years in all.

Two weeks after the attack, before any of the young men had even been tried, Donald Trump ran full-page ads in New York City newspapers headlined “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police.” (New York State did not and does not have a death penalty.) The ads set off an explosion of racist frenzy throughout society, with toxic lies portraying youths of color as “roving bands of wild criminals [who] roam our neighborhoods dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter.” [emphasis in the original]

This ad was a modern-day version of those that appeared in newspapers in the days of the old Jim Crow. Ads that would portray a Black man who somehow offended white supremacy, or did nothing at all, as a demon, and announce the time and place where he was to be lynched.

Donald Trump was a lynch mob master then. And he still is. Only now he has been put on the biggest stage to incite real “twisted hatred” on a global and not a neighborhood scale: against viciously exploited and hunted Mexican immigrants; against demonized and terrorized Muslims; against women; and to threaten “worse than water boarding” against children of those whom this Nazi “suspects” might be “terrorists.” And, oh, yes, this is the fascist who brags about the way that Black protesters at his rallies are harassed and beaten by those he whips up... and who somehow takes nearly a week to “disavow” the endorsement of a leader of the KKK.

We know what that shit says about Donald Chump. But what does it say about a system that tells you that Donald Trump, a modern-day lynch mob-inciting, foaming-at-the-mouth white supremacist fiend, is a legitimate candidate for president? And what does it say about a system’s media that first builds him up and then, even when they “criticize” him, can’t quite bring themselves to say the main truth: that this ghoul is nothing but a white supremacist demagogue?

It says it’s a racist system and it needs to be gone.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/american-crime-case-99-move-massacre-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/textbook-definition-what-is-a-pig-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Textbook Definition: What Is a Pig?...

Updated August 1, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Scroll down for earlier entries.

Earlier entries:

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Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Department of "Man Bites Dog"

Why There Can Be No Right to Eat—Under Capitalism

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

In February, a homeless man in Rome, Italy, was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $114 for shoplifting $4.70 worth of cheese and sausage. Italy’s highest court of appeals then threw out the conviction, saying that stealing small amounts of food in the face of the essential need for nourishment does not constitute a crime.

It’s been said that “it ain’t news if a dog bites a man. But if a man bites a dog, it’s BIG news” because it’s SO unusual. This story hit headlines in countries all over the world and became a “man bites dog” story exactly because it is extremely RARE that a court says it should NOT be a crime when a poor person takes something necessary for survival. MOST OF THE TIME, hungry people who steal food are arrested, convicted and go to jail.

In the U.S., people get locked up all the time for stealing food. In 1995, under the “3 strikes” sentencing laws, 27-year-old Jerry Dewayne Williams in Los Angeles was given 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pizza. In 2013, a jury in Waco, Texas, took two minutes to convict 43-year-old Willie Smith Ward for stealing a rack of ribs and gave him 50 years in prison—which means if he serves his whole sentence for the “crime” of stealing food, he will get out when he’s 93 years old. Last year, Raynette Turner, a mother of eight, died in a Mount Vernon, New York, jail cell after being arrested for allegedly shoplifting crab legs from a grocery store. Think for a minute about those “crimes” and those “sentences” and how this is multiplied over and over and over. The court’s decision in Italy really IS the exception that proves the rule, the one-in-a-million. And let us note that the articles about this case made the point that the court’s decision was not binding and did not set a precedent.

But there’s a deeper lesson here, on why this is such a glaring exception. Bob Avakian has pointed out:

One example that I’ve cited before...is the question of the “right to eat.” Or why, in reality, under this system, there is not a “right to eat.” Now, people can proclaim the “right to eat,” but there is no such right with the workings of this system. You cannot actually implement that as a right, given the dynamics of capitalism and the way in which, as we’ve seen illustrated very dramatically of late, it creates unemployment. It creates and maintains massive impoverishment. (To a certain extent, even while there is significant poverty in the imperialist countries, that is to some degree offset and masked by the extent of parasitism there; imperialism “feeds off” the extreme exploitation of people in the Third World in particular, and some of the “spoils” from this “filter down” in significant ways to the middle strata especially. But, if you look at the world as a whole, capitalism creates and maintains tremendous impoverishment.)

Get into BAsics, the handbook for the revolution.

Many, many people cannot find enough to eat and cannot eat in a way that enables them to be healthy—and in general they cannot maintain conditions that enable them to be healthy. So even right down to something as basic as “the right to eat”—people don’t have that right under capitalism.  If you were to declare it as a right, and people were to act on this and simply started going to where the food is sold as commodities and declaring “we have a more fundamental right than your right to distribute things as commodities and to accumulate capital—we have a right to eat”—and if they started taking the food, well then we know what would happen, and what has happened whenever people do this: “looters, shoot them down in the street.”
—BAsics 1:20

Enough food is actually produced in the world to feed everyone. But some 21,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, with children dying most often. In 2013, there were 161 million children under five years old whose growth had been stunted because of malnutrition. In the past two years, 795 million people, or one out of every nine people who live on this planet, suffered from chronic undernourishment.

So just imagine if hungry people took the words from this Italian court seriously. What if lots of people just went out one night to the supermarket and took what they needed so their kids could get one healthy meal? What if they didn’t do it for just one night, but for a whole month? What would happen to those stores? And what would happen if this were done not just in one city, but all over the world?

Learn more about BA

Well, to finish this thought experiment we have to look at how food ends up in the stores to begin with. As Bob Avakian has discussed, in order for something to get produced under capitalism, even for social needs like food, clothing, and shelter there has to be a “preliminary transformation into capital.” So let’s look at what this means. There has to be an investment of money in a way that turns that investment into capital. So for example, if a particular capitalist wants to make bread to sell, he’s got to take money, (perhaps with a loan from a bank) and invest this in the raw materials that go into the bread, like flour, sugar, oil, etc. He’s got to invest in the factory building, the ovens, the packaging materials, the trucks for transportation. And most importantly, if he doesn’t do this all himself, he has to hire workers—he has to invest in the purchase, the control, and the use of labor power (of people whose work adds value to all this). The capitalist is not primarily motivated by feeding the hungry, but by the objective need to make a profit and accumulate more capital. He has to stay afloat, while at the same time competing with many other capitalists also making bread and trying to accumulate more profit by gaining a bigger share of the market. These are the driving dynamics of this system, to which the capitalists themselves are subject.

Do you know anyone else—any person or organization—that has managed to bring forth an actual PLAN for a radically different society, in all its dimensions, and a CONSTITUTION to codify all this? — A different world IS possible — Check out and order online the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal).

So what happens if instead of the bread getting sold, hungry people “exercise” a “right to eat” and just take it? The capitalist won’t make a profit and possibly won’t even recoup the initial investment he put in to make the bread. And if this keeps happening, he won’t be able to pay back loans to the bank, he won’t have funds for further investment to produce more bread, he won’t be able to pay his rent or his workers. He will go out of business. And if hungry people go into stores and take bread and other food without paying for it, not just one day and not just in one city or country, then supermarkets will go out of business, producers of food will go out of business, and a very basic part of the capitalist economy (the production of food) will start falling apart, drastically affecting the whole capitalist system.

There is already enough food being produced to provide everyone on the planet with a healthy diet. The only reason people are going hungry and dying of starvation is because of this capitalist mode of production.

In contrast, a socialist society has a radically different economy, free of the constraints of having to produce everything through the preliminary transformation into capital. With this, it aims primarily to meet the social needs of all the people, in line with and as part of getting rid of all relations of exploitation and emancipating all of humanity. This does not mean that there would not be a need to figure out how to do this in a way that did not plunder the planet and to substantially remake how agriculture is done in order to feed everyone. Nor does it mean that care would not have to be taken to figure out adjustments in other parts of the economy, so that people could really HAVE this right—so that the necessities of life would be available to all. But it could be done—and all this has not just been outlined but gone into in some depth in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

So think again of those 21,000 people who will die today of hunger or hunger-related causes. Think again of how most of these are children. Think again of 161 million children whose growth will be stunted from malnutrition—picture just one of them as she goes to bed hungry tonight. Then think about how the only thing making that happen is this system and how this could be eradicated through communist revolution.

What are you gonna do?

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/437/two-important-may-1-statements-from-international-communist-groups-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Two Important May 1 Statements from
International Communist Groups

May 2, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

We want to call our readers’ attention to two significant statements released on the occasion of May 1 this year—one from the Communist Party of Iran, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (CPI-MLM) and one from Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia (GCR). Both groups comment on the crossroads now facing communists and revolutionaries all over the world, and both underline the importance of revolutionaries taking up the new synthesis of communism, developed by Bob Avakian. Rather than attempt to summarize them here, we strongly urge our readers to go over them in their entirety.

These statements should give further impetus to every revolutionary communist in every part of the globe to take up this new synthesis of communism, and to be part of what is called for in BA’s seminal new work The Science, The Strategy, The Leadership for An Actual Revolution, And A Radically New Society on the Road to Real Emancipation:

There is an urgent need for this new synthesis to be taken up, broadly, in this society and in the world as a whole: everywhere people are questioning why things are the way they are, and whether a different world is possible; everywhere people are talking about “revolution” but have no real understanding of what revolution means, no scientific approach to analyzing and dealing with what they are up against and what needs to be done; everywhere people are rising up in rebellion but are hemmed in, let down and left to the mercy of murderous oppressors, or misled onto paths which only reinforce, often with barbaric brutality, the enslaving chains of tradition; everywhere people need a way out of their desperate conditions, but do not see the source of their suffering and the path forward out of the darkness.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/437/declaration-of-grupo-comunista-revolucionario-de-colombia-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Declaration of Grupo Comunista Revolucionario de Colombia, May 1, 2016:

Urgently needed: Take up the new synthesis of communism of Bob Avakian, the new framework required for a new stage of revolution!

May 2, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The world as such is intolerable, it is suffocating.

It is a world in which the capacity to feed all human beings coexists disgracefully with more than a billion people who “live” with chronic malnutrition, and literally every five seconds a person dies of hunger!...

It is a world in which they justify wars of aggression in country after country, torture and massacres, with a morality that values the lives of people in Western countries (and of white people, men, the rich) over the lives of everyone else...

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It is a world in which millions of people are forced to risk their lives, driven from their homes by reactionary wars and plunder and other problems caused by the system that rules over them...

It is a world in which the oppressed are rounded up wherever they go, running the risk of an early death, a life foreclosed and ruined, insulted at every turn and even murdered, simply due to who they are...

It is a world where everything (including people, especially women and children) becomes an object to be bought and sold...

It is a world where women face a daily onslaught of harassment, discrimination, oppression and hidden or open and even physical and lethal brutal aggression...

It is a world of outrageous political and legal attacks and vicious intimidation against LGBT people...

It is a world in which, due to the environmental emergency, the future of life on this planet is uncertain...

It is a world ruled by a system that snuffs out spirits, and degrades the people stripping them of their status of full human beings...

And although material resources, knowledge and people exist that could make another way of life possible for all of humanity, they are fettered and then used to suck people into more ignorance, superstition and misery.

Yes, it is true that exploitation and oppression breed resistance. Around the world again and again signs of discontent and outbreaks of fury burst forth. It is commonplace that a deep sentiment arises that there should be a better way to organize human society, that another, different world must be and is possible. But without a scientific approach, method and leadership, in general that sentiment is channeled into dead ends, and the masses continue to be subjected to endless horrors.

Learn more about BA

Today’s world is a horror, not because of human nature but the functioning of the system. There is no permanent necessity for the state of affairs that exists. The world does not have to be this way. There is a way out, communist revolution.

Those who want to create this completely different world immediately confront two things. On the one hand, the repressive forces of the power structure that are used against any challenge to its authority and, on the other hand, there is also contestation in the realm of ideas.

Let us do both: fight the power structure; and debate and wrangle with the most advanced, radical and revolutionary ideas of these times. All in the midst of developing a new revolutionary movement and upsurge, that go further than even the best of the past.

There is debate in society over whether another world is really possible or not, and over what kind of world we want: Is there a way to actually change how people have to live? Instead of changing the various ways in which people suffer oppression, what would it take to eliminate oppression concretely and completely?

In general, there are struggles in the realms of morality, science, religion and worldview; over the question of compromise or resistance; on how to understand and evaluate the first stage of communist revolutions and on many other fronts.

But the most important struggle in the realm of ideas today focuses on the kind of change we need, the theory that can guide this change and the leadership to bring about this radical transformation. There is no other way around it: a revolution, a communist revolution, is still needed.

A real revolution is the only way to end the source of the problem, end the capitalist-imperialist system that dominates the world. The imperialist powers like the United States, the European powers, Russia and China are at the top of this system and dominate countries like Colombia. Of course the capitalist-imperialist system is not all-powerful. There are crises and cracks in the walls of this system. And therein lies the material basis for possibilities of making revolution.

The world capitalist system is no mystery, it can be known and understood. Karl Marx, 150 years ago, laid the foundations for a new science and revealed the secrets of the system’s functioning and how to overthrow it through a new kind of revolution, the communist revolution. Since then, the communists along with millions of proletarians and other oppressed masses throughout the world have tried to continue on this revolutionary path and have changed the history of humanity forever, although they suffered bitter defeats.

The Paris Commune was a first attempt, drowned in blood by the repressive forces of the system after two months. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, synthesized this short but valuable experience and conceived the kind of state needed for the communist revolution: the dictatorship of the proletariat.

On the basis of Marx’s theory and approach, revolutionary efforts to transform the world began. In the twentieth century there were two great socialist revolutions with great achievements and experiences for humanity, first in the Russian Revolution of 1917 under the leadership of Lenin and later the Chinese Revolution in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Tsetung.

With their theoretical developments and advances in the science of Marxism, Lenin and Mao were able to lead the class struggle, amid tremendous difficulties, to victory in order to immediately take to new heights the difficult process of uprooting the old and building a new economic base and political and cultural superstructure for the new society. They undertook what Marx called the great ruptures with traditional property relations and with the traditional ideas produced and conditioned by them.

However, the Soviet Revolution in Russia was defeated in the mid-1950s and the Chinese Revolution was defeated in late 1976. In both cases a new bourgeoisie that emerged within the party and the socialist state seized power and undertook the restoration of capitalism, although they continued to use the label “socialist.”

In grappling with how to understand the reasons for and preventing the restoration of capitalism, Mao developed the science of Marxism, and to that end he proposed and led a “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution was not able to prevent restoration, and after a coup d’état, the “capitalist roaders” seized power and helped imperialism turn China into the “sweatshop” of the world. This brought to an end the first stage of communist revolutions in the history of humanity.

A wave of counterrevolution broke out. And among the oppressed masses, reactionary political movements took hold in many places. But important revolutionary wars led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties also made significant advances that inspired revolutionaries and masses of people worldwide. However, those heroic struggles came up against the reality of the great changes in the world and the limitations and distortions of the theory. And the science of communism demanded a new leap even more. A new framework was needed to lay the basis for a truly new stage of communist revolution.

The communist movement faced a real crossroads. With the false verdicts of the reactionaries and the reformists, the liberating history and experience of communism were being discarded in the revolutionary movement, among the bulk of the previously-progressive intelligentsia and among the masses in general, taking up the tattered flags of bourgeois democracy instead. On the other hand a smaller section clung dogmatically and religiously to the revolutionary experience and theory of the first stage of the revolution, including its errors and limitations.

It should be said that many of the prevailing errors in the international communist movement do not come from Marx, Lenin and Mao, who struggled against many of them. However, elements of these incorrect tendencies existed in their own thinking that were then taken up by one or another section of the communist movement and developed into fully developed lines.

But besides the dead ends of the dogmatic trend and the bourgeois-democratic trend (both increasingly becoming residues of the past), there were those who fought to stay on course and clear the revolutionary way forward. The theoretical and practical developments of the communist movement have been rescued and enriched in vision and clarity by another leap in the science of communism. A new leap whereby it is possible to understand much better than before the functioning of the current system and how to free ourselves from it.

This great breakthrough has not been easy. It has taken decades of painstaking scientific work of analysis of the many aspects of the experience of the first stage of revolution, synthesizing its lessons. It has made it possible to recognize and criticize many errors (although the accomplishments were principal) of this first stage of revolution. Ruptures have been recognized and made with various misconceptions in the body of the science of communism developed by Marx, Lenin and Mao, and all the correct parts in this body (which are principal) have been synthesized and reconfigured at new heights.

This new leap in the science of communism has been the product of the theoretical work and the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and the greatest revolutionary of our time. Avakian has not just stayed the course but has produced a whole body of work with a new synthesis of communism: a new level of freedom with which we can interact with the necessity that we now face and transform it in a revolutionary way. Facing up to the necessity—that is, reality and what we are up against—is the basis for achieving freedom—that is, the capacity to transform that reality (based on understanding it).

Facing reality, as it really is, sounds easy but it is not. It is neither automatic nor “natural,” and therefore requires scientific approach and method. The scientific approach and method of communism has been rescued, given a new foundation and enriched by Bob Avakian, who has identified and engaged the thorniest problems facing revolutionaries. In this process, he has revolutionized communism even more, not only by identifying and breaking with aspects of it that were not scientific but by putting all of communism on a more scientific basis.

Therefore, the essence of the new synthesis is the further development and synthesis of communism as scientific method and approach, and the more systematic application of this scientific method and approach to reality in general and in particular to the revolutionary struggle to overthrow and uproot all systems and relations of exploitation and oppression and advance to a communist world.

As with all advances in all science, these do not easily break new ground. Within the Grupo Comunista Revolucionario itself, a serious struggle has been necessary to understand it, take it up and get bearings with it in order to advance the revolution in Colombia as part of the world revolution, which requires above all building the party required to lead it.

And a central focus of today’s genuine communist revolutionaries, in the midst of the actual process of building the genuine communist party, is working to root the new synthesis of communism developed by Bob Avakian in the revolutionary movement, and among the masses of people as part of building a movement for revolution under the leadership of such a party. All those who really are concerned about the situation in the world and yearn for real change must engage and fight for this new synthesis.

Humanity needs revolution and the new synthesis of communism of Bob Avakian!

Revolution, nothing less!

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/437/communist-party-of-iran-marxist-leninist-maoist-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)—May Day 2016:

This Is an Emergency May Day Call! No Time to Waste!
A Radically Different World Is Possible! Only If We Take Up the New Synthesis of Communism!

May 2, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Living in today’s world is suffocating and unbearable. Just look at refugees fleeing war-torn countries and miserable poverty only to be drowned in the seas while all the giant ships and equipment produced by the work of the same people, by our collective work world-wide, stand still, doing nothing and just watching them go under! And those who do not drown have to face barbed wire, gangster laws, and the law enforcement of reactionary capitalist imperialist states. Is not this enough to want to bury this imperialist capitalist system and their states and laws and law enforcements? Yes, it is!

We produce more food than the earth’s seven billion people need. But millions are dying of hunger and malnutrition. We have produced science that enables us to go back in time more than one billion years to understand our cosmos but children in Africa, Asia and Latin America are dying of preventable diseases and the propaganda and educational machine of the capitalists injects ignorance of all types into the minds of people in every corner of the world. Racists, bigots and religious obscurantists present themselves as poor peoples’ “leaders”! In how many ways can they commit horrors against humanity? There is no question that this world HAS TO CHANGE. But how? This is the most important question facing humanity.

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The source of the problem is the imperialist capitalist system which dominates the world and leads and deploys all sorts of reactionary state powers—including those such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Republic of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc. The great imperialist powers such as the US, European states, China and Russia are sitting at the top of this dung heap. This system must be taken down and a fundamentally different world must replace it. But how and in what way?

The world capitalist system is not all-powerful, it is not a sealed secret never to be known or understood. More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx revealed the secrets of its workings and the way to undo it through a new kind of revolution which is called a COMMUNIST REVOLUTION. Since Marx’s time we, the revolutionary communists along with millions of proletarians and oppressed masses of the world, have tried to go forward on this path and have changed the history of human society forever, but we have also been bitterly defeated.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the very first attempt to do this. But it did not last long enough and it was drowned in blood by the bourgeois state and its military. Marx, and his lifelong comrade Engels, summed up this short but very important experience and drew an overall picture of the kind of state which would be needed to carry through the communist revolution: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Based on Marx’s revolutionary and scientific theory and approach, a revolutionary effort for changing the world began. The twentieth century witnessed two great socialist revolutions with tremendous achievements and experiences for humanity on its march to bury capitalism. It happened first in Russia with the October revolution in 1917 under Lenin’s leadership and then in China with another October revolution in 1949 under Mao’s leadership. Lenin and Mao, with their theoretical breakthroughs and advances of the science of Marxism, were able to navigate class struggle through tremendous odds and uncharted waters to victory and began the tortuous process of uprooting the old and building the new economic base and political and cultural superstructure of the new society. This was the beginning of what Marx called rupturing from the traditional relations of ownership and traditional ideas which are produced and conditioned by them.

The revolutions in Russia and China lasted longer than the Paris Commune but not long enough. The revolution in the Soviet Union was defeated in the mid-1950s, capitalism was restored and a new bourgeoisie that had grown within the socialist state and the Communist Party came to power. The socialist revolution in China continued until 1976. Mao developed the science of Marxism through solving the riddle of why under socialism a capitalist restoration occurs, and how it should be prevented. A second revolution was carried out in Socialist China in order to prevent restoration: the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” But this too failed to prevent capitalist restoration. Following the death of Mao in 1976, capitalist-roaders carried out a coup and seized power. With the assistance of the imperialists they turned China into the biggest and most miserable capitalist sweatshop of the world. In this way the first wave of communist revolution in human history came to an end.

An era of counter-revolution ensued throughout the world.

Instead of revolutionary communist and emancipatory movements, reactionary political movements became popular among desperate and deprived masses. For example, the Iranian revolution of 1979 turned into a counter-revolution when the Islamic fundamentalists seized power.

Not long after this, Soviet Social imperialism, which in contention with the US-led Western imperialist bloc had taken the world to the brink of a nuclear war, faced internal crisis and collapsed. This was used by the international bourgeoisie to claim the so-called “death of communism.” But the USSR was merely another capitalist imperialist state which for historical reasons had kept a socialist mask even after capitalism had been restored in the mid-1950s in the previously Soviet socialist country. After the collapse of the USSR, an era of capitalist “globalisation” gave new life to capitalist greed, wars of aggression, racism, rape of women, infanticide and genocide. Today we can clearly see that if a second wave of communist revolution does not begin, this nightmare of capitalism will continue its destructive existence. But what do we need to initiate this new wave and from where?

There is resistance and struggle throughout the world against all kinds of oppression that the capitalist system doles out to people. Yes, people fight back, but they fight back while having the same illusions the system has produced and trained them with. Many people fight back while holding the religious illusion of taming the wild forces of capitalism by going backwards. Many fight back while maintaining illusions about the possibility of reforming capitalism. We can see it in the Syriza and Podemos movements in Europe. Sadly the only emancipatory vision, programme and movement which is revolutionary communism is absent from the scene and this is the most tragic aspect of the present situation. The emancipatory history and experience of communism are buried. And when you do not know your liberatory history and the tools it has honed, it is like you have been born yesterday. A mere baby facing a vicious and experienced enemy!

But this history and its achievements have been saved for us and rendered much richer in vision and clarity, through another exhilarating leap in the science of communism. With this leap in the science of communism we can understand the workings of capitalism and how this system can be undone through revolution, much better than before. This new leap in our science of revolution has not come easily. In a four decade-long period, very hard scientific work went into dissecting every layer of the experience of the first wave of communist revolution and synthesizing its lessons in order to start the second stage or wave. Many errors of the first stage were identified and criticized. Many wrong understandings in the body of communist science as developed by Marx, Lenin and Mao were dug out, and its mainly correct body was synthesized to a higher level, making it a very sharp and more correct explanation of the complicated world that we have to change. It has also produced a very clear and correct understanding of the tortuous path that we have to open up in order to change the world.

Learn more about BA

This new leap in the science of communism is called the New Synthesis of Communism and this hard work has been carried out by the greatest revolutionary of our time: Bob Avakian. This is the most important and the most urgent message that we want to bring to you on this May Day: to be sure, this exhilarating scientific production stands in the same rank as Marx’s work. It gives humanity a framework to begin the second stage of communist revolution and rise to the challenge of the most urgent need of all humanity: getting rid of capitalism in every corner of the world.

Relying only on our hatred of the suffering of billions of people and all kinds of ugly things that capitalism produces we cannot overthrow it and change the world. We have to get hold of comrade Avakian’s works, just as all revolutionaries back in the 1960s did with the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao. That old stage of science of communism has now divided into two, and a more correct and thus a more revolutionary understanding has come out of its womb.

It is not possible to summarize a whole science and the road map for communist revolution in a May Day message. But through this message, we urgently call upon all those who yearn and need to make a real revolution and radically change the world for the better, to immediately plunge into this scientific work and road map of the new wave of communist revolution. This is the microscope and telescope of a real (and not phony) revolution. To fully abolish capitalism and class-divided society throughout the world is a difficult task to fulfill, and without applying the New Synthesis of Communism we will not be able to take even one step in the right direction and all of our tremendous struggles and sacrifices all over the world will be derailed and exhausted by powerful forces of the system. We have no time to waste! This is our message for a Red May Day!

Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)
—May Day 2016

Contact : cpimlm@gmail.com             Website: www.cpimlm.com

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/news-flash-striking-prisoners-in-alabama-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

News Flash:

Striking Prisoners in Alabama Say "We Will No Longer Contribute to Our Own Oppression"

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On May 1, a coordinated labor strike began involving prisoners in as many as five Alabama prisons. A communication released by the striking prisoners said:

Let us be clear, this is not just about the deplorable conditions of confinement, but more so about the 13th Amendment, the Alabama Constitution of 1901, and the Statutory Laws discriminatorily enacted from both. The laws that create and maintain the denial of our Human Rights and perpetuation of our Economical Exploitation. From Wrongful Convictions, Exceedingly Excessive sentences and Mandatory Life without Parole, Alabama's prisons are literally Warehouses of Men stacked on top of one another, and due to an Arbitrary and Biased Parole Board System, thousands of Men eligible to be released are stopped up in a broken and dangerous system.

Kinetik, Dhati, and Brother M, three prisoners in solitary confinement, and members of the Free Alabama Movement (a “National Movement Against Mass Incarceration and Prison Slavery”), helped organize the strike, which began at Alabama’s Holman, Staton, and Elmore Correctional Facilities. Prisoners at St. Clair, Donaldson, and other correctional facilities also plan to join the strike, which is planned for up to 30 days. Kinetik told Solitary Watch, “We will no longer contribute to our own oppression... We will no longer continue to work for free and be treated like this.”

Prisoners report that in retaliation, guards have been giving them smaller meal portions, putting pressure on them through forced malnourishment. And, in an act of collective punishment, the entire population of Alabama’s striking prisons—including the general prison population—has been placed on “lockdown with limited inmate movement.”

Prisoners are paid 17 to 30 cents an hour to do different jobs, some that generate revenue for the prison from for-profit companies. Prisoners describe inhumane conditions: lack of access to reading material, dangerous living conditions, tainted food and water, negligent treatment of prisoners in solitary, and poor health services. At Holman, prisoners make license plates and sew sheets and pillowcases for the state’s prisons. Elmore prison has a canning and recycling plant and St. Clair contains a vehicle restoration and chemical plant that, according to the Free Alabama Movement, produces more than $25 million worth of chemicals a year. In their statement the striking prisoners liken their conditions to slavery saying, “In theory, the 13th Amendment put an end to and forever abolished slavery, at least that is what we’ve been taught in schools. However, in actual practice, the 13th Amendment merely changed the name, method and rationale for keeping African Americans in a state of perpetual servitude. As the 13th Amendment explicitly permits ‘Involuntary Servitude’— an euphemism for Slavery—as punishment for ‘duly convicted criminals.’”

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/3-more-reasons-why-this-system-cannot-liberate-women-and-must-be-overthrown-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Three More Reasons Why This System Cannot Liberate Women and Must Be Overthrown

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

From a Revolution Club member:

#1 – Laws that “humanize” fetuses and DE-humanize women

Despite the fact that fetuses don’t feel pain, Utah now requires women having abortions later than 20 weeks into the pregnancy have anesthesia administered to the fetus. The governor who signed the bill into law, who claims to be “adamantly pro-life,” is adding a dangerous, medically unnecessary element to the relatively simple procedure of abortion at that stage. This is happening in the midst of an avalanche of bans on abortion earlier and earlier in the pregnancy, making abortions difficult to impossible to obtain, and further reinforcing the notion that a fetus is a baby, and a woman’s life is expendable outside of her ability to reproduce. This law and those like it bend public opinion toward the false notion that a fetus is a small and vulnerable person, which it is NOT, and a woman’s body is merely a vessel for its passage, which it is NOT.

* Fetuses are not babies, abortion is not murder, and women are not incubators. For more on this, see previously published revcom.us articles: “What is an Abortion and Why Women Must Have the Right to Choose...” and “A Fetus Cannot Feel Pain, but a Woman Denied the Right to Abortion Suffers Intolerable Pain.”

#2 – Laws that cripple, close, and mischaracterize abortion clinics

Last week, the Alabama Senate approved a bill that would prevent abortion clinics located within 2,000 feet of a K-8 public school from opening, or renewing their license when it expires, as if abortion is something immoral that endangers children. Similar laws are used for liquor stores. Abortion clinics are much-needed health clinics, which specifically help women gain some control over their lives! Because of this bill approved last week, the existence of Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives—the last fully functioning, “up-to-code” abortion clinic in Alabama—is threatened. In fact, this bill’s only immediate effect will be to shut down the last clinic in the state, the only one that has managed to comply with all the current regulations, including millions of dollars of renovations necessary to meet other, equally unnecessary, legal mandates.

#3 – Policies that silence and endanger the doctors and others who dare to tell the truth about abortion

Do you know anyone else—any person or organization—that has managed to bring forth an actual PLAN for a radically different society, in all its dimensions, and a CONSTITUTION to codify all this? — A different world IS possible — Check out and order online the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal).

Last fall, 11 people were shot and three killed at an attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs. The gunman clearly said in court that this was about “saving babies,” and again, the terror against abortion providers and women was violently reasserted. Among others, Washington, DC, doctor Diane Horvath-Cosper spoke out in the face of that, telling MSNBC that she was not deterred. Soon after, people at the highest levels of the hospital she works at called her in and told her not to talk to the press like that; they didn’t want to attract attention to the fact that the hospital provided abortions. Now, the doctor has filed a civil rights suit against the hospital. Dr. Horvath-Cosper said, “Our silence has never and will never protect us. Patients deserve better than shame and secrecy,” and she is right. Policies like this reflect a deadly logic. It doesn’t take a history degree to know what happens when the truth tellers are told to stay silent while fascists and fanatics speak freely. This is a losing dynamic, and especially unacceptable when real women’s lives and futures are at stake.

As Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, has said:

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.

This rotten system does not deserve to run its shit on people one day longer! Get with the revolution, and fight for a radically different society. Find out about that society here: Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

For more on the most radical revolution the world has ever seen, see Break ALL the Chains! Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/fr-daniel-berrigan-life-of-courageous-resistance-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

Fr. Daniel Berrigan Dies at 94
A Life of Courageous Resistance to the Crimes of the U.S. Empire

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Catholic priest, author, poet, playwright, teacher, and courageous resister Father Daniel J. Berrigan died on Saturday, April 30, at the age of 94.

Dan Berrigan was a person of conscience who consistently opposed U.S. wars, what he called “American military imperialism,” and other forms of oppression, in word and deed, who stood by his principles at real personal cost, and who never capitulated to the empire.

Berrigan’s opposition to America’s crimes was rooted in his radical interpretation of Catholic doctrine and morality. This framework propelled him to stand with the people and oppose oppression on many fronts, even while it negatively influenced other positions, like his opposition to abortion.

Two actions in particular capture Berrigan’s defiance, courage, and radical spirit—qualities urgently needed today—and inspired many, many others to resist.

1968: The Catonsville Nine—Napalming Draft Files to Stop the War

On May 17, 1968, Dan Berrigan, his brother Philip (also at that time a Catholic priest, who died in 2002) and seven other Catholic activists entered the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board, grabbed over 300 files, took them outside, and burned them with homemade napalm. Their goal was to stop the draft, stop America’s widespread criminal use of napalm against the Vietnamese people, and stop the war. “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” Dan Berrigan wrote in a statement from the group.

The action was inspired partly by Berrigan’s trip to North Vietnam where he spent nights in shelters “under the bombs of your own country.” And it was a direct moral challenge to the U.S. population and religious establishment: “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.”

Berrigan became the poet/public voice of what became known as the Catonsville Nine, whose bold, defiant act helped inspire more than 100 similar anti-draft actions and broader, deeper resistance to the war. He also became one of the leaders of what the New York Times called the “Roman Catholic ‘new left,’ articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society.”

The Berrigan brothers were arrested and convicted in 1970. They turned their trial into an indictment of the Vietnam War and then refused to go to prison, instead going underground to spread the resistance (Dan Berrigan becoming the first Catholic priest on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list). They were later caught and imprisoned for over a year.

While Berrigan was a proponent of nonviolent resistance, during the height of the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s he refused to equate the armed resistance and struggle of the Vietnamese people and the Black Panther Party with the violence of the oppressors:

I have a great fear of American violence, not only out there in the military and diplomacy, economics, in industry and advertising, but also in here, in me, close among us. On the other hand, I must say, I have very little fear, from first hand experience of the Vietcong or Panthers. (I hate to use the word violence), for their acts coming from the proximate threat of extinction, from being immediately put on the front lines.

1980: Plowshares—Hammering Nuclear “Hammers of Hell”

Dan Berrigan had nearly died in prison, and, according to his niece Frida Berrigan, could have rested on his “laurels” as one of the “heroes of the peace movement” or spent his life as a writer or teacher. Instead, he continued putting himself on the line to resist U.S. crimes.

In 1980, the Berrigan brothers and six other activists broke into a General Electric nuclear missile plant in Pennsylvania, took hammers to nose cones of nuclear warheads and soaked them in blood. They became known as the Plowshares Eight, helping launch the anti-nuclear weapons Plowshares movement.

Dan Berrigan and the Plowshares activists faced heavy charges—more than 10 different felonies and misdemeanors. Berrigan again used the trial to indict the U.S., calling its nukes “the hammers of hell ... that will break the world to bits,” and condemning the court for refusing to “call them by their right name, which is murder, death, genocide, the end of the world.” He demanded people in the U.S. not turn away but take responsibility to “disarm” these nukes.

Berrigan at 80: “The day after I’m embalmed, that’s when I’ll give it up”

Dan Berrigan never stopped resisting and was arrested many times. He protested the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 1998 Kosovo War, the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and 2003 invasion of Iraq. He denounced Israel for “militarism” and the “domestic repressions” of Palestinians. In 2011, he took part in Occupy Wall Street.

Learn more about BA

In 2007, Berrigan joined over 250 others, including prominent artists, intellectuals and activists, in signing the very important statement titled “Dangerous Times Demand Courageous Voices. Bob Avakian Is Such a Voice.” The statement, published by Engage! A Committee to Project and Protect the Voice of Bob Avakian in the New York Review of Books, read in part:

Bob Avakian combines an unsparing critique of the history and current direction of American society with a sweeping view of world history and the potential for humanity. He has brought forth a fresh, relevant and compelling approach to Marxism, deeply analyzing the history of the Communist movement and the socialist revolutions and upholds their achievements. At the same time, he honestly confronts and criticizes what he views as their shortcomings, opening up new paths of inquiry in the process and initiating dialogue with people who hold a wide range of views. He’s addressing the burning problems before society from a unique vantage point, and we consider his revolutionary analysis and solutions to be an important and necessary part of the ferment and discourse required in this society and the world in this dark time. While those of us signing this statement do not necessarily agree with all of his views, we have come away from encounters with Avakian provoked and enriched in our own thinking, and we invite others to hear and engage that voice....

Thus, in addition to calling on people to engage with the thoughts of Bob Avakian, and bring them into what needs to be a rich and diverse dialogue, we are also serving notice to this government that we intend to defend his right to freely advocate and organize for his views, and to engage broadly with people about those views.
(Full statement here.)

When he turned 80, Berrigan said he’d stop resisting “The day after I’m embalmed, that’s when I’ll give it up.” He remained true to those words until he died.

While revolutionary communists had differences with Father Berrigan over religion, patriarchy, and, most fundamentally, on the need for and road to human emancipation, we can nonetheless appreciate and uphold the life of conscience he lived and the important contributions he made. At this perilous hour for humanity, there is much that can be learned, including by the new generation, from Dan Berrigan’s life and example.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/438/awtwns-when-is-it-ok-to-bomb-a-hospital-en.html

Revolution #438 May 9, 2016

From A World to Win News Service

When Is It OK to Bomb a Hospital?

May 9, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

May 2, 2016. A World to Win News Service. The al-Quds hospital was one of the very few remaining in Aleppo, Syria and the only one with facilities and personnel to treat children. It was hit by one or more air strikes on the night of April 27. Video from a surveillance camera in a hospital corridor shows Dr Muhammad Waseem Moaz, said to be the leading and perhaps last paediatrician in the city, closing a door, adjusting his hospital scrubs and stepping toward the emergency room just as an explosion blows in the front door and the walls and ceiling collapse. He and at least 26 other staff and patients were killed in the attack on this hospital supported by the international medical volunteer organization Medécins Sans Frontiѐres (MSF—Doctors Without Borders).

Two other hospitals in the Aleppo area were hit the same day, also in air strikes carried out by the Bashar al-Assad government, according to the New York Times. An Al Jazeera military analyst stated it is standard procedure, in these kinds of wars against insurgents, to hit vital civilian facilities, in order to terrorize and drive out the civilian population and isolate opposition fighters. But such acts are supposedly illegal under international law, specifically the Geneva Conventions that define the “rules of war.”

In short, the attack on the al-Quds hospital was criminal, a war crime to be unequivocally condemned and the people behind it brought to justice. Few would believe it was an accident, because it fit an established pattern and served identifiable goals.

Yet what about the U.S. attack on a Médecins Sans Frontiѐres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October? Cannon fire and strafing killed 42 people, including three children and 14 medical staff, and injured dozens more. Patients burned alive in their beds. Surviving medics had to operate on the wounded, including each other, on a desktop standing amid the rubble.

The U.S. refused to allow an independent international body established by the Geneva Conventions to investigate. Instead, the Pentagon investigated itself, concluding, in a report released April 29, 2016 that the “tragic strike” was “unintentional,” caused by a series of human errors and “equipment failures.”

These are the undisputed facts about the Kunduz hospital attack:

• The medical NGO had given the U.S. armed forces the precise coordinates of the hospital’s location long before the attack.
• A minute before the AC-130 gunship took off from the Bagram base, headquarters for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, crew members gave their superiors the coordinates of the target they intended to strike—the hospital.
• The aircraft flew low enough over the hospital to see it. It was marked by MSF banners and a prominent hospital logo on the roof.
• About eleven minutes after the gunship began firing shells and strafing the hospital, MSF began calling Afghan and U.S. military and civilian officials to halt the attack. The head of the U.S. Central Command said in an April 29 news conference that the order to stop the assault was given 19 minutes later, or about a half hour after it began. But according to MSF, the aircraft’s cannons pounded the building for more than an hour. Machine gun fire hit people trying to flee the burning building.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, as MSF spokespeople pressed hard on the U.S. government for an explanation, the Pentagon had little to say. They let stand an Afghan government claim that Taliban fighters had taken over the hospital and were using it as a base against attacking government forces. There was an implication—and still is, in the latest Pentagon report—that the gunship was defending American soldiers, or at least that the U.S. military thought that was the case. There were, it turns out, no U.S. ground troops in the area, and no arms in the hospital, although the medical staff quite correctly refuses to distinguish among those who come for help. But even if the military’s alleged fears were true, and even if they attacked the hospital by mistake, MSF has clearly stated that the intense and prolonged attack was on a densely populated area and should never have taken place no matter what.

Citing the haste with which the aircraft took off, the failure of communications and targeting systems and the crew’s disorientation, the U.S. announced it would include reprimands in the files of unnamed soldiers and officers, but that there would be no courts-martial because no crime was committed—not murder (premeditated killing), not manslaughter (killing without seeking to do so) and not even criminal negligence. A driver whose headlights failed and became disoriented and then, instead of stopping, ran into a school bus would not get off so lightly. In short, as MSF points out, the U.S. is saying that such things are the inevitable cost of war, just collateral damage.

This conclusion is more than an exoneration for the soldiers and officers involved, which would be bad enough. It is a self-exoneration of the whole U.S. military chain of command and the government headed by that military’s commander in chief, Barack Obama.

It is a “rule of war” that commanders are responsible for the actions of their troops. What’s more, Obama, through his silence in public and his obvious, if never publicly spoken, approval of the Pentagon cover-up, could be held criminally responsible before and after the fact, if the same rules were applied to the U.S. as to countries and armies the U.S. and its allies and friends have defeated, from Germany and Japan in World War 2 to Serbia and African countries today.

But the “cost of war” point has to be addressed. Is this war itself right or wrong? This the basic question. Underlying the Pentagon’s argument is the claim that because it is right for the U.S. to wage this war, its cost has to be accepted. MSF and other volunteers don’t address the question, and yet it is the heart of the matter.

What is the U.S. fighting for in Afghanistan? The U.S. supported Islamists when that seemed to suit American interests (grabbing Afghanistan from its Soviet rivals). Then the U.S. gave the Pakistani secret services the green light to bring the Taliban to power, although that turned out to be problematic for the U.S. Now Washington is sending troops and gunships to save the Kabul government—the Islamist government it installed—from other Islamists.

When the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the pretext was to protect “American lives” from Islamic fundamentalist attacks and “liberate” the Afghan people. What we have seen since then is that Western invasions, occupations and other crimes provide the conditions for Islamism to flourish. Further, the idea that “American lives” are worth more than those of anyone else, including children murdered by U.S. forces and/or U.S.-supplied weapons and munitions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine and elsewhere, is a keystone in the imperialist ideology that justifies such crimes and turns ordinary people into accomplices.

Why is Obama presiding over the bombing of hospitals? To defend his “legacy,” as the man behind the “surge” that saw Afghanistan overrun by U.S. troops—and that breathed new life into the Taliban, the president who still keeps 10,000 U.S. soldiers and 3,000 other NATO troops there today? If Obama ever intended to end that war, or U.S. aggression in general, as some people fooled themselves into believing, why the surge, and why the continuing insistence that U.S. troops cannot leave until American interests are secured?

The purpose of a war determines the way it is fought. A war of liberation has to rally the people; it has nothing to rely on but the active participation of increasing numbers of the masses of people. Not only would it not target civilians, it would fight in a way meant to minimize harm to the people whose interests it serves, even at risk to its own forces. A reactionary war such as that waged by the U.S.-led occupiers in Afghanistan—and the Islamist opposition—necessarily takes all Afghans as potential targets because the interests behind it are completely opposed to the interests of the people.

The Kunduz hospital attack, and the continuing occupation it serves, are driven by the same geopolitical interests that led the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in the first place: to dominate a key region and keep out its rivals. These crimes are part of trying to hold on to global domination in a worldwide system of exploitation and oppression presided over by the political representatives of finance capital headquartered in a handful of countries.

Heroic volunteers are going to have to try to save children and other civilians burned alive again and again, until that imperialist system is brought down.