Black community members begging for “resources”—be aware:

March 20, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

If Trump gives you “resources,” he is sinking werewolf fangs into your neck. The youth need a real solution—REVOLUTION.

When Trump was elected. he made a lot of noise that he was bringing back jobs to the U.S. And he issued a Mafioso-style threat—“If Chicago doesn’t fix the carnage, I will send in the feds.”

The Death of Hadiya Pendleton and the System’s False Promises

Chicago, and every decent person, was torn in anguish after high school student Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed in a park in Chicago just days after she performed for President Obama’s second inauguration in January 2013. Michelle Obama returned to Chicago a few months later and delivered an impassioned plea to Chicago business leaders, urging them to take action to combat youth gun violence.

This event, hosted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and attended by some of the city’s most powerful business leaders, was a lunch and fundraiser for a public-private partnership which planned to raise $50 million for anti-violence youth initiatives in Chicago to be administered through the Get IN Foundation.

As of June 2015, two years later, the “foundation had disbursed only $3.7 million in grants to youth programs, while spending $900,000 per year on its own administrative salaries and overhead, as revealed by the most recent available records,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

Basics, from the talks and writings of Bob AvakianPeople say: “You mean to tell me that these youth running around selling drugs and killing each other, and caught up in all kinds of other stuff, can be a backbone of this revolutionary state power in the future?” Yes—but not as they are now, and not without struggle. They weren’t always selling drugs and killing each other, and the rest of it—and they don’t have to be into all that in the future. Ask yourself: how does it happen that you go from beautiful children to supposedly “irredeemable monsters” in a few years? It’s because of the system, and what it does to people—not because of “unchanging and unchangeable human nature.”

Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:17

WHY CAN’T THE SYSTEM PUT YOUTH TO WORK MEETING NEEDS LIKE HOUSING? Take just one example: poor neighborhoods are falling apart, while youths stand around on corners, hustling to survive. There is an obvious need—decent housing AND people who could fill that need—unemployed youths. But it doesn’t happen. Why? The rules of capitalism are such that they do not put resources into something unless it can make a profit.

As Bob Avakian, the leader of this revolution, explains, “Money just sitting there doing nothing is not capital—it’s just money. If it were money in the hands of a socialist government, we’d say: what are the social needs and how do we apply this accumulated wealth to meet those social needs in the context of everything else that we have to take into account? We wouldn’t have to undergo the preliminary transformation into capital. But a capitalist, or a capitalist system, fundamentally cannot do that. Particular capitalists have to say: how can we invest this in labor power, as well as in raw materials, in means of transportation, and so on, in a way which will be most profitable for us? The defining feature of capitalism is profit in command—and profit accumulated privately.” (See "Preliminary Transformation into Capital"... And Putting an End to Capitalism)

Social justice activists and others in the Black community in Chicago listened to this and somehow heard an offer to send federal resources to help Chicago’s impoverished neighborhoods. At a televised MSNBC town hall titled “Chicago in the Cross Hairs,” audience members alternately implored or demanded that Trump provide resources as the solution to dealing with the horrific violence among especially the youths who are maiming and killing each other as well as bystanders. Progressive clergy at a protest called for “resources, not more police forces.”

To the people begging for resources, you need to face reality: the only way you are going to get “resources” is if the system gives them to you. You have your hand out to a system that has never had anything for Black people but super-exploitation and oppression, and that now has no future at all for them. And, its new commander in chief is actively plotting to crush them on a whole other level. The Trump/Pence regime aims to deal once and for all with what the rulers of this country see as a “Black people problem.” They want to put an end to Black people’s ability to fight their oppression as a people. So any “resources” you get from the Trump/Pence regime will come with a very steep price to pay—co-operation with this plan.

Whatever your intention, you will be setting people up to follow those who are actively roping people into carrying this out. And don’t kid yourselves, this “bargain with the devil” will change the people who take it up, not the other way around.

The Trump regime plan has three killing thrusts to it:

  1. hammer Black people into even more hellish and prison-like conditions than already exist in segregated and oppressed areas of the city and literally stuff more people into actual prisons;
  2. numb and cripple the minds of Black and Brown children with Christian fundamentalist schools that do not teach them critical thinking: how to learn about the reality of the world and ways it can be changed; and
  3. reward some Black people for being the bootlickers, enforcers, and pigs for the US empire... joining the U.S. military to bomb and kill other oppressed people or act like the slave catchers of old by tracking immigrants and ripping apart their families as they are deported.

And let’s look at the actual reality—if somehow you could get some pitiful resources this would make no difference to the masses of these youth. Look at the pathetic programs of people like Arne Duncan (Obama’s secretary of education) scrounging up a handful of jobs that pay peanuts. Or Michelle Obama’s highly publicized “corporate funding pledges” for youth programs that went absolutely nowhere after the tragic and senseless killing of Hadiya Pendelton.

But even more to the heart of things is this: Yes, these youths are killing each other and, yes, resources are sucked out of the communities of the oppressed by this capitalist and white supremacist system, while people are effectively told to rot in hell. But it goes way deeper than lack of “resources.” This system has NO FUTURE for these youths and it drills that message into them through the media, the schools designed to fail, and most of all by the police and the prisons. There is no way to have respect, to be somebody, to have a measure of worth as a human being besides the code of the street and revenge—a dead-end trap that breeds more and more of the horrific violence.

There is just one thing that can actually deal with these hundreds of years of the oppression of Black people and all the other crimes and outrages committed by this system—the oppression of women, ruining the environment, wars for empire, demonizing and deporting immigrants. Just one thing that can take that rage and defiance among these youths, as well as their creativity and courage, and give that an outlet that would mean something extremely positive not just for them but for all of humanity. And that is the solution we need—revolution.

It is in the course of fighting for this, a revolution aimed at nothing less than a whole new society, a new state power, a society far better than this on the road to a truly communist world without exploitation or any kind of oppression, that these youths can transform themselves as they fight to bring into being a far better world.

Chicago right now is used twice by the rulers of this country—on the one hand, as a “lab” to carry out vicious repression that lays the foundations for genocide; and on the other, as an object lesson to the world. The growth of a real revolution—in which the youths who today are fighting and killing each other over what is really in the end nothing, take up instead the real fight against oppression—this could make all the difference not just for Chicago but for the world. You can be part of making that happen or you can end up as a tool of Trump, even if you talk very militantly all the while.

The overall plan for this revolution has been charted by Bob Avakian (BA), the leader of the revolution. There is a blueprint, an actual Constitution for this new socialist society. And BA deeply gets that these very same youths who are now cast off and whose anger is being expressed in very negative and harmful ways against each other can in fact transform themselves into becoming emancipators of humanity. This is why BA never ceases challenging and fighting for them to get out of the shit they are caught up in and GET INTO THE REVOLUTION. This is a key part of the strategy BA has led in developing, “fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution.”

 

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.