The Future Is Calling… The REVOLUTION Is Real.

The world as it is today is intolerable. More and more people understand that things cannot go on in this way, and that humanity needs a way out. But everywhere they turn they are offered false solutions.

There is only one real way to emancipate humanity: revolution, communist revolution. And there is a leadership that makes the prospect of this revolution real. But people don’t know this.

You are reading this issue of Revolution at a moment when the world communist revolution stands at a crossroads. Over thirty years ago, after the death of Mao, a counter-revolutionary coup in revolutionary China killed and imprisoned thousands of revolutionary communists and restored capitalism. The oppressed and freedom-loving people of the world lost what had been a beacon, a base area, and an inspiration for the world revolution. Since that bitter defeat, the capitalist-imperialist class worldwide has conducted a relentless ideological and political assault against communism.

Today, the revolutionary communist movement, worldwide, faces the very real and sharply posed question of whether it will be a vanguard of the future, or residue of the past. Vanguard of the future is the only acceptable answer to that question. Putting revolution and communism back on the map—not just surviving, but contending as a real force, all over the planet: this must become the mission of this generation.

We have a plan

As a critical step in initiating a new stage of communist revolution, in July 2009 the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA launched an important campaign. The Message and Call of that campaign, “The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have” is reprinted in this issue of Revolution (see centerspread).

The objectives of this campaign are three:

to familiarize millions with the goal and character of communist revolution, as it has been reconceived by Bob Avakian, to inject this into the discourse in a radically creative and urgent way;
to make known very broadly in society the leadership of Bob Avakian—giving people a sense of the work he is carrying out, his history and character as a rare and outstanding communist leader, and—on the broadest level—his connection to revolution;
through all this to begin forging a core of dedicated, passionate and conscious fighters for this revolution.

All this, in turn, is part of sparking, worldwide, a new stage of communist revolution… and preparing people now for the time when revolution could be made in the USA, the heartland of imperialism.

This campaign has been the focus and pivot of our Party’s efforts over many months. In this issue of Revolution, you’ll get a snapshot of what happens when radical light and air get into the atmosphere on campuses and in the inner cities. You will get a feel for what it means when this movement gets a toehold among some of the most brutally oppressed in this society—in the dungeons this system calls “Security Housing Units” in their inhumane prisons, and you will connect with a critical battle to overturn the ban on this newspaper at Pelican Bay State Prison in California and other prisons in this country.

You will get new insights into the crimes of this system, but more than that, how—IF WE HAD STATE POWER—WE COULD CREATE A RADICALLY DIFFERENT AND FAR BETTER WORLD.

There are many dimensions to this campaign, and in different, but connected ways, they reveal the hidden truth that things do not have to be this way, that a whole other way is possible. Society, actually, has not always been organized with oppressors and oppressed. Those divisions arose at a certain period in human history thousands of years ago. Today, we are at a stage of human development where there is NO MORE NEED for oppressors.

This campaign brings that to life. When people hear Sunsara Taylor speak on “From the Burkha to the Thong: Everything Must, and Can, Change—WE NEED TOTAL REVOLUTION,” they not only hear a powerful exposure of how things are and what revolution could do to change them, they actually also experience an alternative morality based on liberation, not patriarchy. When people take initiative under revolutionary leadership to stand up to police brutality, illegal harassment, repression and murder, they foreshadow a completely different authority that protects the people and their rights. When people engage with Raymond Lotta’s compellingly documented case that everything they have been told about communism is wrong, then things they have accepted as “just the way things are” no longer are found acceptable. When people read the special issue of Revolution on the environment emergency, they join a work-in-progress to figure out how a socialist economic system would make it possible to get beyond the “get-rich-quick” mode of capitalism, and for society to take a long-range view of restoring and preserving the environment. When people of all walks of life read letters from revolutionary prisoners in some of the worst torture chambers in U.S. prisons, it gives people hope and begins to expose the lie that people treat each other in this society the way they do because of some supposedly unchangeable “human nature.”

And when people get with Bob Avakian—when they spend real time watching his classic talk, Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, … or reading his memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond,... or getting into his other work—a whole new world of possibility opens out for them. When, together with others, they go back and forth with the Chairman’s works, digging deeply, they begin to get hold of a scientific understanding and approach to reality that unlocks the doors of understanding. And another world really does become possible.

The glue that holds this all together, and the key to breaking through to the other side is bringing to life the real secret that is kept from people: THINGS HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY, THEY DO NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, AND THERE IS A WAY TO GET TO A WHOLE OTHER, AND MUCH BETTER WORLD.

We ARE BUILDING a movement for revolution. And that movement needs you.

This campaign needs to go to another level. The stakes are no less than whether or not there will be a real, liberating, and living alternative to the horrors of the capitalist system. We ARE BUILDING a movement for revolution. And that movement needs you.

If you are new to this, or you have been a part of it, there is a moment to seize, and a place for you. On the occasion of May 1, 2010, we call on people to mark this revolutionary holiday with the spirit and determination it must really symbolize. Study this issue of Revolution, especially the Message and Call. Take it to the projects, the workplaces, the schools, where people’s lives go from bad to worse, where the police constantly hound the youth and the future is one of prison steel, where families are put on the street when they can’t make rent, and where immigrants face vigilantes and state terror. Take it to the universities where intellectual discourse all too often is suffocated and critical thought needs to soar. Take it to scientists straining against the constraints of a system that cares nothing for truth—including the truth of impending environmental disaster—and sees scientists only as an immediate source for profit or better ways to wage imperialist wars. Take it to academics frustrated by the suffocation of intellectual ferment and curiosity. Take them this issue, tell them about this movement and the ways they can support and take part. Find the ways that people can be mobilized to “Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution.”

And go to revolutiontalk.net and start watching, and get others to watch Bob Avakian’s video Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About.

Talk with us at Revolution Books in your area (see page 15), find us online at revcom.us, or email us at rcppubs@hotmail.com.

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