On the Heart-Grinding Shootings and Killings in Chicago—and the Future We Must Fight For

by Joe Veale

August 13, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

One weekend. Two days. 74 people shot. 12 dead. Those shot range in age from 11 years old to someone in their 60s. Many are very young. Some are teenagers. Some are just in their 20s. Precious human beings... every last one of them.

Including those who for now are caught in the vicious trap of shooting and killing other people who are just like them. Shooting and killing people who ARE JUST LIKE THEM—for retaliation, for payback, for “respect.”

Bob Avakian posed the question in BAsics, the handbook of the revolution: “...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.’” Let’s get into this.

Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, and that whole fascist regime, calls these youth “animals” and they call for sending in the feds to: “MAKE CHICAGO SAFE AGAIN”—“SAFE” for whom? That is just a code word like Trump saying: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT [WHITE] AGAIN.” These are barely disguised code words calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, and LGBTQ people.

Obama called these youth “thugs” after they rose up in rebellion following the police murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. And blamed their parents when they got failing grades in school—saying they needed to stop feeding them fried fish and grits for breakfast.

Hillary Clinton called these youth “super-predators.”

But let’s look at what the SYSTEM that Trump, Obama, and Clinton represent does to our youth.

Look at the future they face. By the time of adolescence, if not before, it is already crystal clear this capitalist-imperialist system has no future for them. They are treated as criminals. As “dumb” people. People with “anger management” issues.

After the defeat of the slave system in the Civil War, this system forced Black people back onto the plantations as sharecroppers in the Jim Crow system of white supremacy with the KKK, sheriffs, and lynch mobs. Then after World War 2, people were driven off the land and they left for the North and went out west to escape Jim Crow and in search of a better life to support their families—they went to work in the steel plants, shipyards, meat-packing, and auto factories—in the lowest-paid, most dirty and dangerous jobs, last hired and first fired.

But over the last few decades those jobs were shipped out of the inner cities—going first to the South, then to Mexico in the maquiladora factories along the border, then to Asia in search of cheaper labor and greater return on the investments in this system—so people coming up nowadays find a different situation. If they can get any work at all, it is something that only reinforces the notion that they are not worth shit. A chump change job that further degrades instead of affirming their humanity. The whole way this system, with white supremacy in its DNA, is structured tells them that the only thing they deserve, as Bob Avakian exposes in his talk REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! is a boot up their ass and a bullet in their brain.

Of course, no human being will accept shit like that. They will find ways to defy that shit. People will “resist” being treated in this dehumanizing way. Anybody in similar conditions will try to find a way to make it through this world in a way they find gives meaning, and “dignity” to their existence. However long or short that existence might be.

Whether anybody likes it or not, these youth find that meaning and “dignity,” that meaning you get from belonging to something—from being part of something bigger than yourself—from the gang life.

But that life only mirrors the larger life of this SYSTEM and its values that produced and shaped ALL this shit in the first place.

So when people say Stop the Violence, I ask: What is the root cause of the violence? And how do we strike at, uproot, and overturn that?

No one should have to live the life these youth have to put up with. Even more importantly no one has to.

But that can ONLY be accomplished through the revolution to overthrow this system. We have the strategy and leadership for that. We have BA, Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolution and the architect of a new framework for human emancipation. A new communism.

When people get into this revolution, they change the world and they change themselves. I was not so different from some of these youth “back in the day.” But I ran into the revolution and as I fought against oppression, people struggled with me to change my outlook. Then, when I got into Bob Avakian and what he’s bringing forward, I changed still more.

At the beginning of the quote above, BA says: “People 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....” (BAsics 3:17)

I call on these youth: bring your anger, bring your defiance, bring your “resistance” into the revolution. If you are going to die, make it be about contributing to overthrowing this system. So that at the very least the generation coming up with you and behind you will have the opportunity to fight for something better—for revolution to overthrow this system, and to build a whole new world.

It is like what BA says in BAsics 3:16:

An Appeal to Those the System Has Cast Off

Here I am speaking not only to prisoners but to those whose life is lived on the desperate edge, whether or not they find some work; to those without work or even homes; to all those the system and its enforcers treat as so much human waste material.

Raise your sights above the degradation and madness, the muck and demoralization, above the individual battle to survive and to “be somebody” on the terms of the imperialists—of fouler, more monstrous criminals than mythology has ever invented or jails ever held. Become a part of the human saviors of humanity: the gravediggers of this system and the bearers of the future communist society.

This is not just talk or an attempt to make poetry here: there are great tasks to be fulfilled, great struggles to be carried out, and yes great sacrifices to be made to accomplish all this. But there is a world to save—and to win—and in that process those this system has counted as nothing can count for a great deal. They represent a great reserve force that must become an active force for the proletarian revolution.