What is different and new in the new communism?

... the new communism is a continuation of, but also a qualitative leap beyond, and in even some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed.

Excerpt from The Bob Avakian Interviews (2025) Humanity Does Not Have to Live This Way! Part 2: The New Communism: A Whole New Way To Live, a Fundamentally Different System

Watch the full interview at youtube.com/BobAvakianOfficial

See more on the new communism in

A Major New Work By Bob Avakian.

HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness? Posted on revcom.us.

Editors' Note: The following is from the talk "Why We're in the Situation We're in Today...And What to Do About It: A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution," one of the 7 Talks given by Bob Avakian in 2006. Audio of the 7 Talks, plus the Question and Answer Session, with Concluding Remarks, is available at revcom.us. In preparing this for publication, the author has edited and expanded parts of it, and has included subheads and footnotes.

“Preliminary Transformation into Capital”...And Putting an End to Capitalism

by Bob Avakian

April 8, 2012

In order to understand what the problem is in the world, there are two words we could focus on. Those two words are: “preliminary transformation.” These are words that Frederick Engels used in describing how capitalism operates—in explicating Marx’s great breakthroughs in uncovering the nature of capitalist production and accumulation. Or, to convey more fully what Marx was getting at, we could expand this focus slightly to include the four words: “preliminary transformation into capital.”

Now, what Marx was talking about, and what’s crucial to grasp, is that specifically in the sphere of economics—which is the foundation of all societies, and of all systems—in order for anything to be done within the realm of capitalism, and in line with the dynamics of capitalism, social wealth (money or whatever) has to undergo a preliminary transformation into capital. In other words, if you’re talking about building housing, for example, under capitalism, this has to be done through the dynamics of how the capitalist system operates—there has to be investment in a way that turns that investment into capital. Now what do I mean by capital? Most fundamentally: control over and use of the labor power (the ability to work) of others, and the utilization of that labor power to produce profit that is accumulated privately. Let’s break that down.

Say, for example, you have a stack of money: how do you make it undergo the “preliminary transformation into capital?” 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. That’s why Marx referred to the accumulation of surplus value (or profit) as “Moses and the prophets” of the capitalist system. You have to pursue the accumulation of profit—and it essentially has to take place in the form of private capital and profit in private hands.¹

So, in order for something to happen under capitalism—such as, again, housing being built—whatever would be allocated to that has to undergo this preliminary transformation into capital; it has to be transformed into the investment of capital, into the means of production and into labor power, which are under the control of particular capitalists. And then, as the Sherlock Holmes character would say, “the game’s afoot.” Then the question is: can you make back what you invested, what you transformed into capital—can you recoup that, plus an additional amount? You are not operating in the abstract or in a vacuum, you are operating in conditions of competition with other capitalists—and, increasingly under the capitalist system, you are dealing with monopolies, with large scale and international aggregations and associations of capital. So you cannot just say: “We have a social need, housing, let’s apply money to build housing.” You have to undergo that preliminary transformation—to turn things into capital and then see if that capital can be more profitably employed in building housing, or in something else. And you can lose—when I say “the game’s afoot,” you can lose the whole thing. You are investing in buildings, and other means of production, and each individual capitalist or aggregate or association of capital is doing the same thing—turning whatever they’ve accumulated, whatever they have at hand, into capital—not just investing in means of production (such as buildings in which to carry out production) but, again, purchasing labor power, to try to more intensively and extensively exploit the workers who are employed by that capital, whose labor power has been purchased by that capital and is now being used by the capitalist, and is the sole means through which more wealth can be produced and accumulated as capital. You are doing all this in order to complete the process of re-accumulating wealth: recouping your initial investment—but not just that—beyond that, accumulating wealth on a bigger scale. The point is, you cannot just say: “Let’s chart up all the social needs, let’s see how much we have available to us and, through a process of political decision-making, let’s allocate what we think is the best and wisest allocation of resources to the various social needs we can identify.” You cannot do that under capitalism, because there’s that necessary step of “preliminary transformation into capital,” and then the drive, the competitive drive—the drive conditioned by competition with other capitalists seeking to do the same thing—to recoup that capital not just on the scale on which it was originally invested (the scale on which you originally transformed things into capital) but on a bigger scale (again, based on the exploitation of wage labor) in order to, in turn, repeat the process, in competition with everyone else doing the same thing.

Capital will, it must, chase the most profitable investment—that is the nature of capitalism—and if it’s not most profitable to build housing, you won’t do it even if you can identify a great social need. Or you will not take into account environmental concerns, because (as Raymond Lotta has pointed out a number of times in talks and writings published in Revolution) such environmental concerns are considered “externalities” from the point of view of capitalism. Such concerns don’t figure into the calculations that I was just speaking of. These are somebody else’s concern, somewhere else.

The Government Cannot “Regulate Away” the Fundamental Dynamics of Capitalism

Well, some people might say, the capitalists do have a government and they do have “wise people,” above and beyond individual competing capitalists who are conditioned and driven by the need to go through this “preliminary transformation into capital” and then the need to have it reassume the form of capital on a higher level, in the form of profit. There’s a government there—even under capitalism, why can’t the government identify the social needs, get the revenue it needs, and then apply the revenue to meet those social needs, even while private capital is doing what it does? Why can’t the government curb and restrict and control capital so that it doesn’t get completely out of hand? Well, let’s just briefly walk this through.

Alright, where does the government get its money from (to put it simply, to boil it down to simple terms)? Well, it can get it by borrowing—but then that has to be repaid, and with interest, so that in and of itself is not a money-making venture for the government. When it sells bonds and similar things for its borrowing activity, those are purchased usually by banks, or other financial institutions, and those bonds have to be repaid with interest. The government could also print more money; in the final analysis, however, simply doing that doesn’t create more wealth but contributes to reducing the value of the currency. Ultimately, in order to meet its financial requirements, the government has to raise revenue that is larger than what it already has. How does it do that? Through taxes. Now, on what basis does the government tax? It taxes private citizens, and it does tax businesses and corporations. And in turn all that cumulative money, from which the government could tax, depends ultimately, under the system of capitalism, on the profitability of capital investment. If the capitalist economy is not doing well, not profiting, the wages of workers will go down; and therefore, the money you can tax from them will be less. The earnings of the petite bourgeoisie—the small business owners and small traders, and so on—will go down, and the profits of the corporations will go down. And the money you can tax from them will be less.

Ultimately, what the government can raise—even in the sphere in which it might seek to, in a certain sense, “stand above” competing capitalists and address social needs—this still depends upon the profitability of the system, on the operation of capitalism in an overall sense. It still depends on that process which begins with the preliminary transformation into capital and aims to end up with more capital than was initially invested through that preliminary transformation. So, even the contexts and the limits and confines within which the government can address social needs depends, in an ultimate and fundamental sense, on the profitability of capitalism. The government is not free, even within this limited sphere, to say: “What is social need?—let’s raise the money and then let’s apply it to the social needs.” Because, after all, taxes are in fact in conflict with profitability for discrete, individual aggregations of capital—corporations and banks, and so on. Taxes are in conflict with that.²Now, to the degree that capitalists can recognize the larger interests of their class, and to the degree they have the freedom to do so because their profitability is great enough at a particular time, they can, under many circumstances, be prevailed upon to accept certain taxation. But it’s always working against this whole other drive which is fundamental to this system—a drive which takes place not through just one big capitalist sitting somewhere deciding on investments, but through competing aggregations of capital which will drive each other under.

This is not just happening in one country, it’s happening internationally—and even if you regulated what the capitalists could do in a particular country, that regulation would break down because of the international dynamics in which capitalism is embedded in this era in particular, this era of capitalist imperialism. The capitalists in your country would be undermined and driven under by other capitalists, in other countries, who didn’t have those constraints on them, if you imposed constraints (such as taxes) beyond a certain point in a particular country. Plus, capitalism operates on a gigantic scale and speculates on a gigantic scale and is highly parasitic on a whole international level anyway. And, once again, ultimately—not in a linear or simplistic sense, but ultimately—the economics will determine the politics. If you constrict and constrain the capitalists too much, there will arise among them conscious representatives who will get rid of you and bring forward other representatives of the ruling class who will not do that to them. You see this battled out all the time within the ranks of the capitalists and through their political system. There is the political expression of this and then, if you dig more deeply, you can see it in terms of how it goes on behind the scenes—not in open political contestation so much, but behind the scenes.

Why “Life is Not Fair,” Under Capitalism...Why the World is the Way It is, and How It Could Be Radically Different

The reason “life is not fair” is because the capitalist system operates according to certain dynamics. And one of them is that most of the people in the world scramble to have barely enough to eat—or don’t succeed in having enough to eat. That is daily existence for the majority of humanity. Now, if you step back from it, you would say to yourself: “Well, what could be more basic than the right to eat, what is more essential to life than the basic right to eat—and to have some shelter, and to have clothes—but, in a concentrated sense, the right to eat, what could be more basic?” How can it be that you have a world in which there is no right to eat? In which the great majority of humanity either does not have enough to eat or has to scuffle everyday to get enough to eat. How can that be? Especially amidst all the wealth there is in the world that surrounds and mocks people at every turn. Once again, materialism, dialectical materialism, teaches us that this is because of the fundamental production relations of capitalism: the fundamental contradiction of capitalism between the socially produced wealth—wealth that is created by large numbers of people working in networks of production—and the private accumulation of that wealth by aggregations of competing capitalists.

This is fundamentally related to the phenomenon that’s described by “preliminary transformation into capital.” It is driven by the need of capital to reproduce itself, and on an expanded scale—not to reproduce and expand social wealth to be distributed according to the needs of the people, but to reproduce itself as capital on an expanded scale.

There’s a vast difference between reproducing wealth on an expanded scale which can be and is applied to meet social needs, and reproducing wealth on an expanding basis as capital. In understanding that difference you understand fundamental things about why the world is the way it is and how it could be radically different.

NOTES

¹ Even if we’re talking about state capitalism as it existed in the Soviet Union for a time—from the time of Khrushchev, beginning in the mid-1950s, until the end of the Soviet Union itself, at the beginning of the 1990s—even under the state form, while the state played the centralizing and key role in regard to the economy and the accumulation of capital, nevertheless that capital in fact consisted of particular and competing capitals—through different regional ministries, through different sectors of the economy and those who had the predominant influence in those sectors, etc. So “the one social capital of the state” in turn was made up of many and competing capitals. This has to do with the fundamental nature and dynamics of capitalism, which will assert themselves and have effect once the essential “law” (the “Moses and the prophets”) of capitalism—the drive for the accumulation of profit above all else, and in particular above social need—has assumed the commanding role. [back]

² While taxes do underwrite the vital functions of government that serve the larger, longer-term, and more strategic interests of capital, like the preservation and extension of empire, and while certain government activities may directly or indirectly enhance the overall profitability of capital, it remains the case that taxes are in conflict with profitability for individual aggregations of capital. [back]

This is from a talk given almost 10 years ago, during the first Trump fascist regime, and it is especially relevant and important now, in light of the massive crimes being perpetrated by the present Trump fascist regime, which is even more unleashed and giving even more terrible expression to its truly monstrous aims, with all this being irrationally “justified,” and even celebrated, on the basis of a literally deranged Christian fascist lunacy (often referred to as Christian nationalism).

Excerpt from the 2017 talk, “The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America! A Better World Is Possible.”

Besides the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, who is himself a Christian Fascist, to the Supreme Court—reestablishing, after the death of Antonin Scalia, the rightwing majority on the Court—Trump’s cabinet is full of these Christian Fascists.

Perhaps it seems harsh, or even extreme, to refer to these fundamentalist Christians as fascists. Well, in Katherine Stewart’s book The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, she cites these comments by Rich Lang, himself a former Christian fundamentalist, who broke with that and became a liberal Christian pastor:

“When I was born again [Lang recalls], faith was something inside of you, something you were supposed to reflect through your life. But in the 1980s, something happened. Fundamentalist Christianity jumped back into the public square with the intention to reshape the country as a Christian nation as defined by them....

“It’s no different than the Nazis wanting to start with the Hitler Youth. That is where you’d want to start if you were trying to build a fascist movement....

“That’s the word, ‘fascism.’ Nobody likes to use it in this country. But I believe that in this country, underneath the appearances, that is exactly the great temptation of our time....and you have to call it what it is – `Christian Fascism.’”

Stewart further summarizes Lang’s views this way: “ Modern fundamentalism, like fascism in earlier times, he says, involves a strong feeling of persecution, typically at the hands of godless liberals or a religious ‘other’; the belief that one belongs to a pure race or national group that is responsible for past greatness, suffers unjust oppression in the present, and is the rightful ruler of the world; the impulse to submit unquestioningly to absolute authority; and the relentless drive for power and control. It is, he says, a kind of supremacist movement, with religion rather than race at its core.”

And there is this chilling statement by Lang:

“People have no idea it’s going on....

“What does it mean that the conservative church that’s growing in America is an endtimes church? What does it mean that we are raising a generation of children to believe that they are the last generation? What is going to happen if we keep on telling them, ‘Don’t care about the environment, and bring on the war, because we’re going to be lifted out of here, and you can forget about loving your neighbors, because they’re just going to get blown away?’”

Often, at the high tide of an upsurge against oppression, you’ll hear people say that they’re “just never going to give up,” but when they encounter obstacles, the protests subside.

Bob Avakian speaks to why you need more than determination, and why theory is the dynamic factor in ideology—that people act on the basis of what they have come to understand.

–From The Bob Avakian Interviews (2025) Part 1

Watch this and take the challenge: can you name a continent where the US imperialists have not committed atrocities on a truly massive scale?

The people who run this system are, without exaggeration, brutal tyrants and mass murderers on a world class and worldwide scale. This is not because of some evil nature, it is because of the dynamics of the system of capitalism-imperialism and the way this sets the basic framework terms and limits of these politicians.

An excerpt from the 2012 talk, BA Speaks: REVOLUTION - Nothing Less!

» revolutiontalk.net

An excerpt from Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About

by Bob Avakian

This excerpt is from the section of the talk titled “Emmett Till and Jim Crow: Black people lived under a death sentence.” View this clip, as well as another relevant section titled “They’re selling postcards of the hanging” and other clips, online here.

Then there’s the story of Emmett Till. Emmett Till was born and grew up in Chicago. In 1955, when he had just turned 14, he went to Mississippi to visit family there. His mother warned and she schooled him about what he would find in Mississippi, what a young Black male like himself should expect, what he must do and not do in order to stay alive. And think about the fact that a mother has to school her child that way just when he goes to visit family. But Emmett Till was full of life and full of fun. One day, while in Money, Mississippi, he made the fatal mistake of whistling at a white woman as he was leaving a store owned by her husband. A few days later, the storeowner and his brother-in-law came in the middle of the night with guns and took Emmett Till away. They were seen beating him as they drove him away. His relatives began looking for his body along river banks and under bridges where Black folks always look when things like this happen, as his uncle put it. Think about that, think about what that means—where Black folks always look when this kind of thing happens. Think about what that tells you about this country. Emmett Till’s body was found in a river. He was beaten and shot to death. Beaten so badly he could barely be recognized, even by his mother. A 14-year-old boy lynched. For what? For whistling at a white woman.

In an act of tremendous courage and large-mindedness, his mother, Mamie Till, displayed his body publicly in Chicago. And she refused to have it touched up so that all could see what had been done to him. His body was viewed by tens of thousands of Black people in Chicago.

The story of what happened to Emmett Till aroused deep anger among Black people all over the country. It shocked many white people in many parts of the country and it became an international news story and outrage.

But back in Mississippi, white people rallied to the defense of the men who had kidnapped and brutally murdered Emmett Till. These men were put on trial only because of the outrage around the country and around the world. Death threats and terror against Black people in the area where this lynching took place were increased to keep them from saying what they knew and how they felt about this lynching. In a court room that was segregated, with white people filling the seats, and the few Black people who were allowed in, forced to stand at the back, the jury of all white men found the murderers of Emmett Till not guilty in an hour. Their lawyers even accused Mamie Till and the NAACP of conspiring to cook up this whole story of the lynching. Actually, Emmett Till was alive in Detroit, these lawyers claimed. Not long after they were acquitted of this crime, the two men sold their story to a national magazine, telling in detail how they brutally murdered Emmett Till. But nothing was ever done to them. Despite a massive campaign calling for the federal government to indict these two men, the government refused. Sound familiar?

Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was President of the United States at the time, never even answered a telegram sent to him by Mamie Till. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, called this brutal lynching of Emmett Till “an alleged murder,” and he gave much more attention to investigating the involvement of communists in protesting this lynching than he ever did to the lynching itself. But the lynching of Emmett Till became a rallying cry for Black people. People stood up who had never stood up before, as Mamie Till put it.

In talking about these lynchings, I’m not exaggerating any of this. In fact, I’ve actually left out some of the most gruesome and disgusting details in talking about these lynchings because there is only so much of this that you can stand to talk about or to hear about. And these were not the so-called isolated incidents, the way they always try to tell us, whenever they get caught in one of their brutalities or murders, the way they try to cover up the real crimes of this system and those who rule it. Thousands of Black people were lynched in those times. And all Black people lived with a constant terror of this.

Listen to the following statement by the author of a book about lynching. He said, “It is doubtful that any Black male growing up in the rural South in the period 1900 to 1940 was not traumatized by a fear of being lynched.” What is he saying with this? Nothing less than this: no Black male growing up in the rural South in that period could be free of that fear. Every Black male was haunted and scarred deeply by that fear. Think about what that means and think about how this touched Black people as a whole. A sociologist who studied Black life in Mississippi in the 1930s learned how deeply the threat of lynching was in the minds of all Black people, from the very young to the very old. And in a PBS program on the system of segregation in the South, which was called the Jim Crow system, they quoted a psychologist who said that every Black person living in the South under Jim Crow was living actually under a death sentence. It might or might not actually get carried out, but it was always there. Black people could be killed for anything they did which might offend some white people and the whites who killed them would never be punished. A Black man could be lynched for looking at a white woman in a way that some white people thought was the wrong way, and the whites who killed them, again, would never be punished. Or a grown Black man could be killed for not calling a young white boy “sir,” or for not stepping off the sidewalk to make way for white people or for any reason or no reason at all. And this was related to the overall outrages to which Black people were subjected. This experience of lynching and its effect on the masses of Black people can in a real sense be taken as representing and concentrating the experience of Black people as a whole, long after literal slavery with all its horrors had been ended in the 1860s.

Frederick Douglass was a slave himself who after he got his own freedom, spent his life fighting against the oppression of Black people and other injustices. Invited to speak at a July Fourth celebration [in 1852], Douglass made clear that July Fourth was nothing to celebrate and that America was guilty of great crimes. Here’s what he said about it: “What, to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all of your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages....

“There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.” And Douglass also said, America may accuse others of savagery, but really it has no equal when it comes to this. He said, “For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, American reigns without a rival.”

As the saying goes, truer words were never spoken. Douglass spoke these words while slavery still legally existed in the United States, but his comments apply just as much even after outright slavery was ended, and all this time, while all these lynchings and other acts of incredible cruelty were being carried out, with all the oppression they embodied and enforced, all this time those who ruled this country, those who refused to do anything to stop these lynchings or other acts of terror and atrocities, those who were responsible for these and other barbaric crimes, all this time, they never stopped proclaiming, “This is the greatest country in the world... this is the greatest country that has ever been... this is the leader of the free world... this is the homeland of freedom and democracy.”

It is not just that many white people acted like depraved beasts. And it is not that some were actually devils, although it certainly may have seemed that way many times in the history of this country. The deeper thing is that all these horrors were shaped by, they were encouraged by, and they served to keep in effect a whole system, a system that could not have existed without first slavery, and then near-slavery. And segregation and terror centered in the South while the great majority of Black people lived there, chained in one way or another to the rural South and on white-owned plantations. White supremacy is built into the foundation of this country. It is something this system and those who rule it could not do without even if they wanted to, which they don’t. And this has continued down to the present. Despite all the false claims these days about how this is now a colorblind society, segregation and discrimination continue against Black people and other people of color. Every time there is a study or a survey to determine this, it shows without fail that segregation and discrimination exist in housing, in jobs, in schools, in health care, in every part of society. And this continues to be backed up with brutality and violence.

The last time I spoke publicly in this country, in 1979, I took a detour from the speaking tour to go to Chester, South Carolina because Black people there were uprising because a young Black male, in the year 1979, had been lynched for dating a white girl. And more recently in, yes, Texas, there was the horror of what was done to James Byrd, a Black man who was taken by white thugs and good ol’ boys, tied to the back of a pickup and dragged until his head was separated from his body and his body was dismembered.

This is still going on in this “greatest of all countries.” But today, it is mostly the police who openly, as the police, carry out brutality and terror against Black youth and Black people in general. Applying that author’s statement on lynching to the present, we could put it this way. It is doubtful that there is a young Black male, growing up in the U.S. today, in the South or the North, who does not have a very real fear of being brutalized or even murdered by the police. And again, this touches all Black people. Another book on the history of lynching of Black people in the South makes this point—and think about this: Black parents learn to fear more for some sons than for others: those who were surly, who had attitude, or who were rebellious, or were careless, who had not learned the art of appearing to know their place. They were in greater danger. And tragically, parents had no choice but to try to keep their sons especially from showing those qualities—like self-confidence, curiosity, ambitiousness—that could be interpreted as insolence or arrogance by white people. However, this author goes on to say, there was only so much that could be done by the parents in trying to prevent disaster. Any unlucky circumstance could instantly put a Black man at deadly risk.

And today we see the same thing. In our Party’s work in the housing projects, one of the most heart-rending things we’ve learned is how Black mothers in the projects start to worry early on if the boys that they’ve given birth to start to show that they might grow up to be large. Because then they’ll have everything come down on them that comes down on a large Black male. Think of what this means, that a mother, from the time that her child is two or three years old, has to worry that he might grow up to be too big so he might be seen to be a threat by the police and then cut down and murdered brutally by them.

What kind of a society, what kind of system is this?

A Forced March Into the Abyss,

or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness?

By Bob Avakian

March 2026

The Problem: Capitalism-Imperialism—Confining and Force-Marching Humanity to Disaster

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels refer to historical experience where the struggle between contending classes—between oppressor and oppressed groups in society—has led at times to the victory of one or the other, but also, at times, to the “common ruin of the contending classes.”

(There are many striking examples of this in the new book Goliath’s Curse, by Luke Kemp.)

Today, the prospect of “common ruin”—not just of contending classes and social forces, but of humanity as a whole—is a real and terrible prospect, as a result of the confinement of humanity within the awful relations and dynamics of the system dominating the world, the system of capitalism-imperialism. This gives concrete meaning to and underlines the urgency of my statement:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.

Since the emergence of class and social divisions and antagonisms among human beings thousands of years ago, and the development of powerful oppressive states, history has been marked by the rise and then the fall of empires—only to be replaced by other empires. But today’s world is different.

There is the all too present, and now once again increasing, danger of nuclear war, particularly between the U.S. imperialists on the one hand and Russia and China, also capitalist-imperialist, on the other hand.

There is the ongoing, and rapidly increasing, destruction of the environment.

At revcom.us, in a number of works by Raymond Lotta, and others, as well as answers I provided to an interview requested by the publication Markaz Review (answers which they then declined to publish), there is scientific analysis of how the basic necessity and underlying dynamics of the capitalist system are accelerating the already far advanced danger of climate catastrophe. And with the rule now of the Trump fascist regime in this country, long a major polluter of the environment, things are rapidly going from very bad to even more terrible.

Trump ran on a platform of “drill baby drill!”—and since coming to power he has opened up new areas, including public lands, for exploration and exploitation of oil and other resources—fossil fuels in particular. He has denounced, including in a speech at the UN, the reality of climate crisis as a “con job”: “It’s a con job, only losers believe it...” And at the recent COP 30 conference in Brazil the whole thing was a farce. They couldn’t even agree, even in words, on what would have been a meaningless pledge to reduce fossil fuel—and, in fact, as I’ve said, the plundering of fossil fuels is increasing—not being curtailed, let alone eliminated.

There is the melting of the polar ice as part of the overall warming of the planet. And here is something very striking: What do these imperialists all around do in the face of this melting of the polar ice? Do they say, “Oh, this is terrible, it’s gonna contribute in a major way to accelerating the climate crisis.” NO. They see it as a question of strategic contention for control of key sea lanes that are now being opened up by the melting ice. This has a great deal to do with why Trump keeps proclaiming that he’s gonna “by one means or another”—I was gonna say “fair or foul” but they’re bound to be foul—he’s going to take control of Greenland, because it has everything to do with what I just mentioned in terms of strategic contention. This is the way the imperialist system and the leaders of the imperialist system respond to a major development in the climate crisis.

At the same time, Trump has proclaimed what many have called a new Monroe Doctrine: the insistence that the Americas are the “backyard” of the U.S. This goes along with his changing the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”—in his own mind at least, and all too much in how some others have responded to that. He has engaged in naked military aggression against Venezuela, with the declared intent of taking over and “running” that country, with its vast oil reserves. He has also threatened Cuba, and the president of Colombia as well as the president of Mexico, interfered in the affairs of Brazil, Argentina and Honduras—all with the aim of insisting on and re-enforcing the whole notion of the Americas as the backyard, and as the sphere of influence and province to be dominated by U.S. imperialism.

Trump is aggressively reviving the role of classical Imperialist Bully, committing yet more acts of aggression and war crimes against less powerful countries, in line with the long, ugly tradition of Yankee military intervention in Central and South America in particular.

Yet this is not the world of the 19th or the early 20th century, and it remains to be seen what will result from Trump’s big power bullying and old-style colonialist military aggression.

In a larger dimension, Trump’s aggressive actions toward Latin America are part of strategic great-power imperialist contention with China in particular, which has become a major force in trade and relations with Latin American countries, including Venezuela: China has, for some time, been a major source for the export of Venezuelan oil. (Trump and his affiliated fascists regard China, not Russia, as the main challenger and threat to U.S. global dominance; even Trump’s approach to Russia and the war in Ukraine is aimed, at least in part, at severing, or at least weakening, Russia’s ties with China.)

Trump’s aggressive military posture and actions with regard to Latin America, and overall, are an expression of the monstrous system of capitalism-imperialism, which has given rise to fascism, as an extreme expression of the predatory, and moribund, nature of this system, in this country and as a broader phenomenon in the world.

In the statement from Refuse Fascism calling for massive nonviolent but determined mobilization aiming to drive out the Trump regime, there is this important description of the comprehensive nature of this fascist regime and its actions:

The Trump Fascist Regime is shredding the rule of law. Making a mockery of due process. Illegitimately deploying the military on U.S. soil. Disappearing immigrants and other brown-skinned people into brutal concentration camps. Aggressively resurrecting genocidal white supremacy. Reversing the gains not only of the 1960s, but even of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Enslaving women through the brutality and suffocation of forced motherhood. Erasing LGBT people. Trampling democratic rights. Violating international law. Assaulting and threatening politicians and judges. Paving the way for boundless terror against the people. Accelerating climate collapse. Cutting science and medicine, costing millions of lives. Depleting humanity’s store of knowledge. Destroying truth. Drowning out reason. Subjugating the arts to fascist cruelty and conformity. Targeting everything that is decent, moral and good. All at the whim of a debased lunatic tyrant.

In short, this is: A white supremacist, “masculine” woman-hating, American supremacist, anti-scientific Christian fundamentalist fascist regime whose power is exercised with deliberate terror and cruelty directed against real or imagined “enemies,” against anyone it sees as actually or potentially resisting, or obstructing, its barbaric rule.

An article at revcom.us sharply summarizes this:

Faced with a huge crisis of that very system [of capitalism-imperialism], the fascist section of this imperialist ruling class—Trump, Miller, Vance and all the rest—are on a mission to save that system through a fascist form of rule. In their view, a fascist form of rule—one rooted in blatant, open and violent white supremacy, in male domination of women and repression of LGBT people, and in open hatred and massive scapegoating of those they consider “foreigners”; one saturated in anti-scientific ignorance and theocratic fundamentalist Christianity; and one in which due process and civil liberties are essentially wiped out—[this in their view] is the only thing that can save the empire. (Stephen Miller [a major force within this fascist regime] says immigrants come from—and must return to—“broken homelands”… but the REAL question is: Who Broke Those “Homelands”? And What Does That Tell Us About the Fascists Who Now Rule This One?)

This fascist assault on immigrants—which has overwhelmingly targeted non-criminal immigrants, many of whom have been in the country for long periods and have made significant contributions to the economy—this is being carried out with a concentrated attack on people from the Third World, as part of the Trump fascist drive to Make America White Again, despite the fact that, as Raymond Lotta has pointed out, “immigrants from the Third World are essential to profitable functioning of key segments of the U.S. economy.” (This is from the essay by Lotta, Imperialist Parasitism and Class-Social Recomposition in the U.S. From the 1970s to Today: An Exploration of Trends and Changes.)

This fascism is a concentrated expression of the fact that this system of capitalism-imperialism is running up against its limits. It is proclaimed that in this country there is “liberty and justice for all,” but there is a whole history, and continuing reality, of savage inequality and brutal, literally murderous oppression of Black people and other people of color. There is the ongoing oppression based on sex and gender. Even short of all-out war between imperialist powers, this system is the fundamental cause of continuing wars as well as environmental devastation and plunder of countries throughout the Third World especially—all resulting in the uprooting of huge numbers of migrants into the U.S. (and other capitalist-imperialist countries). All this is built into and results from the basic relations, dynamics, and compulsions of this system, which cannot provide any positive answer to all this. At the same time, it remains true that where there is oppression there will be resistance—and the righteous resistance and rebellion against the oppressive relations and actions of this system has in turn strengthened the appeal of fascism among sections of the people, and of the ruling class, who are determined that not only the basic oppressive relations, but the most extreme expressions and excesses of this, must be brutally enforced. (In this country this is concentrated in the slogan “Make America Great Again,” while it finds different particular expressions in countries in Europe, and elsewhere, where powerful fascist forces have developed as an horrific expression of these basic contradictions. In my social media message #118, available @BobAvakianOfficial, I get into some of the key dimensions of this more fully.)

To repeat this crucial point from my January 2021 New Year’s Statement:

to the degree that things are maintained within the limits of this system, this will actually have the effect of furthering the horrors for humanity that are built into this system, while also reinforcing and giving further impetus to the underlying economic—and the social and political—forces that will strengthen the fascism that has already shown great strength in this country (and a number of others).

But, fascism:

as an open and aggressive dictatorship, trampling on and perverting the rule of law, relying on violence and terror, on behalf of the predatory capitalist system and as an extreme attempt to deal with profound social division and acute crises (both within the country and in the global arena)... might hold things together, in an extremely negative way, for a certain period, [but] in the final analysis this cannot succeed—cannot indefinitely preserve this system of capitalism-imperialism, and cannot lead to any future but one of horrors for humanity, if indeed we have a future at all. And the supposed “alternative,” as represented for example by the Democratic Party in the U.S., involving a “more democratic” means of exercising the rule of this system, will also continue to embody and enforce terrible and completely unnecessary suffering for the masses of humanity and pose an existential threat to humanity as a whole, even if not always through the same brute and unmitigated juggernaut of horrors as the fascist form of capitalist dictatorship.

Here it’s worth stepping back and reviewing the history of this country and the system in this country from the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to today—to the thoroughly outmoded monstrosity of capitalism-imperialism. At the beginning of this country, at the initiation of the war of independence (which they like to call a revolutionary war), it was declared that “all men are created equal.” But the whole history of this country from that time forward has proven that it is definitely not the case within this country that there is equality for all. Even at the time when the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution were written, there were huge numbers of slaves. There were Native Americans whose land was being stolen and who were being subjected to genocidal atrocity. There were women who basically had no rights, and certainly none equal to men. There was, in short, a system of exploitation which was given further impetus by breaking free of British colonialism.

So when you watch, for example, the Ken Burns series on the American Revolution—if you can work your way through and put aside the disgusting hosannas about how great this revolution was, how it was the greatest thing that’s ever happened in the world, and so on—there are some of these things that I’ve talked about, but it’s all in the framework of what liberals today like to talk about: “Yes, there were certain flaws—we even had the certain original sin of slavery, yes, we did this and that, terrible things to the Native Americans, people without property and women didn’t have the same rights as rich men—but we’ve always been moving toward a more perfect union.” When in reality, what they’ve actually been working toward—or, in any case, what has resulted from what was set in motion with the American Revolution, in the context of the larger world—is a completely horrific system of capitalism-imperialism which, again, has long since become outmoded, is long past its expiration date, and its continuation can only involve the continual infliction of terrible suffering for humanity.

The point is not that we should be nihilists—just thoughtlessly negating everything about the American Revolution and the founding documents of this country. As I’ve pointed to before, there are certain things in the U.S. Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution), which can be learned from—and I have incorporated some of this into a fundamentally different framework in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America. The point is that, despite some positive elements at the time of the founding of this country, it was even then a system of vicious exploitation and literally murderous oppression; and all this had within it the seeds and elements of where it has gone—to a terrible place, with the system of capitalism-imperialism now.

It is crucial to understand, and to enable growing numbers of people to understand, these basic truths—which are not “self-evident,” but are hidden and disguised through the very functioning of the system we live under, the system of capitalism-imperialism—basic truths that must be brought to light through the application of a scientific method and approach to reality.

The political system in this country is the rule—the dictatorship—of the section of society that dominates the economic system—the capitalist-imperialist class—a dictatorship that finds concentrated expression in the monopoly of political power, and more especially the monopoly of “legitimate” violence, exercised by the political representatives of this system and its ruling class. All the dominant processes and institutions of this system (including its elections) fundamentally serve and enforce this dictatorship. In its “normal” form, and as administered by the “mainstream” section of the ruling class, this is a dictatorship representing the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, and this dictatorship is more or less disguised as “democracy” and “rule by the people,” with basic adherence to a “rule of law” which ultimately embodies and reflects the basic relations in society and serves the fundamental interests of the ruling class while being applied, however unequally, to people in society generally.

As one significant example of the way in which this dictatorship, and its “rule of law,” “ultimately embodies and reflects the basic relations in society and serves the fundamental interests of the ruling class,” there is the fact that it is perfectly legal, under this system, for capitalists to “lay off” masses of people, if they can no longer be profitably exploited, even if this means that those who are “laid off” might become homeless, or even starve; but it is definitely illegal for people in this desperate situation to just take the basic necessities they lack, without paying for them, even if the reason they cannot pay for them is because they have been denied employment. All this corresponds to the basic “property relations” of the capitalist system. The “rule of law” in any system will essentially be an expression of those basic property relations—most fundamentally the production relations of the underlying mode of production. (More, later, on the crucial role of the mode of production as the foundation of any system, which ultimately determines the nature of that system, including its politics, ideology and culture, as well as its social relations.)

In the more overtly political dimension, as spoken to in my social media message number #17, beneath the outer shell of “democracy” in this country there is

living proof that this so-called “great American democracy” is in reality a dictatorship, where the power of the ruling institutions is used to viciously persecute, punish, and even eliminate people who pose a threat to the interests of the ruling class. Along with the murder by police and mass incarceration of thousands and millions of people in this country...there is the vicious repression being brought down against people protesting the genocide in Palestine carried out by Israel, with the full backing of the U.S. government and both ruling class political parties (Democrat and Republican)....

Why is this happening? Because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake.

There are many other examples that sharply illustrate this basic truth about the actual dictatorship under the “normal democratic” rule of this system—such as the outlawing of opposition to the U.S. role in World War 1, and the imprisoning of Japanese people in concentration camps during World War 2 (which was done during the administration of the great “hero” of “progressive” bourgeois democrats, Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

The rule of the Trump regime is the dictatorship of one section of the ruling class, which is determined to impose fascism as the form of capitalist-imperialist rule, utilizing the force and violence of the state (police and military forces and repressive institutions of government, such as the FBI, “Homeland Security,” etc.) not only against people in society as a whole but also against the “mainstream” section of the ruling class. With fascism, dictatorship is open, blatant, undisguised dictatorship, and the exploitation and oppression that is the actual basis and nature of this system of capitalist-imperialism, within this country and internationally, is blatant, undisguised exploitation and oppression, unrestrained by the “norms” and “rules” of “mainstream” capitalist-imperialist dictatorship. The following, from “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating,” clearly points to what, in fact, is taking place now:

Given the nature, objectives and actions of the fascists, there is the real possibility of actual civil war. But given the nature, objectives and actions of the “mainstream” section of the ruling class (as represented by the Democratic Party and media such as MSNBC [now MS-NOW], the New York Times and CNN), and given the current situation with those, from different parts of society, who tend to support, and politically tail behind, this “mainstream” section of the ruling class, it is possible that the fascists could achieve and consolidate power without a civil war, but with all the terrible consequences that would follow this fascist consolidation of power. Or, as emphasized in the “Declaration and Call” [from the revcoms] in what would amount to a one-sided civil war, these fascists could carry out a slaughter of those they hate, including Black people and other people of color, “illegal immigrants,” “uppity women” and those who don’t conform to “traditional” sexual and gender relations and “norms.”

In any case, it is a deadly serious reality that these fascists are determined to crush—as violently as necessary—anyone and anything, anywhere in society, that stands in the way of implementing their horrific objectives.

Both parts of this situation are vitally important to understand: There is a real and important difference between “mainstream” and “fascist” rule, and both “fascist” and “mainstream” rule are fundamentally forms of the dictatorship of the ruling capitalist class, representing, and enforcing, the interests of the capitalist-imperialist system, not just in this country but throughout the world.

In Hope For Humanity On A Scientific Basis, Breaking with Individualism, Parasitism and American Chauvinism, written during the first Trump regime, there is this important discussion of both very real and important differences, as well as the ultimate, underlying unity, between the different sections of the ruling class:

In an article in the New York Times, “Racism Comes Out of the Closet,” Paul Krugman makes the point that not just Donald Trump but the Republican Party as a whole has gone from “dog whistling” racism to overtly and crudely expressing it. Krugman concludes this article this way, referring to the Republican Party’s dropping of even any pretense of opposing racism:

It’s tempting to say that Republican claims to support racial equality were always hypocritical; it’s even tempting to welcome the move [on their part] from dog whistles to open racism. But if hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, what we’re seeing now is a party that no longer feels the need to pay that tribute. And that’s deeply frightening.

Krugman does have a point—an important and relevant point—here, as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go far enough, and in particular does not break out of the constricting terms of contradictions and conflicts among ruling class parties (the Republicans and the Democrats). The stance of hypocritically pretending opposition to such outrages as racist oppression, while in fact acting as the representatives, functionaries and enforcers of a system that has this oppression built into it and could not exist without this oppression—this does not just apply to the Republican Party in the past...but also applies to the Democratic Party. What is concentrated in this situation is the need to recognize, and correctly handle, a very real and acute contradiction: the fact that, on the one hand, the Democratic Party, as much as the Republican Party, is a party of a system that continually commits, and cannot help committing, massive crimes against the masses of humanity and embodies an existential threat to the very future of humanity; and, on the other hand, the fact that (to paraphrase what is cited above from Krugman’s article) there is a very real difference and very direct danger embodied in the fact that one of these ruling class parties (the Republicans) openly abandons much of the pretense of being anything other than a rapacious, and yes racist, plunderer of human beings and of the environment. This requires the correct synthesis of, in fundamental terms, opposing the whole system, of which both of these parties are instruments, and actively working, in an ongoing way, toward the strategic goal of abolishing this system, while also, with the same fundamental strategic perspective, recognizing the acute immediate danger posed by [in that case] the fascist Trump/Pence regime, and working urgently to bring forward masses of people in non-violent but sustained mobilization around the demand that this regime must go!

This same basic, and crucial, understanding is expressed in the recent article at revcom.us, Venezuela and the Fascist Way of War, Mass Murder Is Legal Because We Say So:

The U.S. military has always been a machine of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Just look through the American Crime series on this website, revcom.us, for mountains of evidence. (See for instance, American Crime Case #96: Vietnam, March 16, 1968 and American Crime Case #93, U.S. Invasion of Korea—1950.) But Hegseth is moving to rip away any pretense of legality. This is a fascist military doctrine aiming to reforge the existing U.S. military into a fascist fighting force: a force ready and willing to carry out illegal orders and kill civilians because the fascist tyrant said so.

While they have very serious differences with the fascists, the “mainstream” imperialists and institutions like the Democratic Party will not, and cannot, fight these fascists the way they need to be fought. (As one important indication of this, there is the fact that, instead of acting with the necessary “deliberate speed” to indict Trump for his flagrant crimes, in particular his attempt to pull off a coup after he lost the 2020 election but refused to accept the results of that election and rallied forces in the attempt to unlawfully overturn it, the Biden administration dragged out the process of indicting Trump, squandering the political initiative and momentum Biden’s administration had because of the outrage over Trump’s attempted coup. The Biden administration, and its Attorney General, Merrick Garland, failed to act quickly and decisively to indict Trump because they did not want to appear to be “politicizing the process”! This is the same kind of logic that Biden applied when he refused to take action to expand the Supreme Court, when it was already obviously “politicized,” and the result of Biden’s inaction was that the Supreme Court has continued to be dominated by fascists, with all the consequences of that, especially now with Trump having returned to power with a vengeance.)

Now, the Trump regime is on a rampage to viciously suppress opposition and resistance to its fascist rule—including by declaring that any forces that are “anti-capitalist” or “anti-American” or “anti-Christian,” and generally anyone that the Trump regime designates as “enemies” (including by using the vague and “catch-all” term “Antifa”) can be labeled “domestic terrorists” and subjected to severe government repression.

Meanwhile, forces which are an extension of or aligned with the Democratic Party (and in general the “mainstream” section of the ruling class), have joined—and given their own particular “progressive” spin to—the attacks on Refuse Fascism and the revcoms who, along with others from many different political perspectives, are active in Refuse Fascism. This is an expression of the desperate determination to keep things within the confines and on the basis of the “norms of this system”—norms that the fascists are openly defying and running roughshod over (and “norms” that, in fact, are criminal to begin with).

As one significant dimension of this, it is another expression of the fact that, as soon as anything with which we revcoms are associated gains traction—as soon as the Call by Refuse Fascism to mobilize masses to DC around the one unifying demand that the Trump fascist regime must go, now—as soon as this has galvanized political sentiment and found active support among significant numbers of people, even if not the millions it has called for: out come the knives. This is a repeat of the experience in 2022 when, as it was made clear that there was a real possibility that the Supreme Court would rip away the right to abortion by reversing Roe v. Wade—and revcoms united with others to form RiseUp4AbortionRights!, determined to rally mass opposition to this outrage of reversing Roe—instead of joining in with RiseUp and the tens of thousands it was mobilizing, a motley group of opportunists launched slanderous attacks on RiseUp and the revcoms.

These attacks, on RiseUp, and now on Refuse Fascism, are on the level of that old crazy, cartoonish movie “Reefer Madness,” with the promotion of irrational anti-communist hysteria, involving crude distortions and ludicrous and long-disproven lies about the revcoms and Bob Avakian, including mindless accusations of “cult.”

The basic, and extremely harmful, position of those making these unprincipled attacks is, yes, unite all who can be united against this fascism—so long as it remains confined within the norms and limits of the capitalist-imperialist system.

The basic method is not to engage and express principled opposition to actual positions and work of Refuse Fascism or the revcoms, but to repeat and rely on low-level rumors, gossip, and plainly stupid snark—to blatantly lie and hope that no one looks into what is being lied about.

These kinds of attacks are giving opportunism a bad name. If these present-day opportunists felt the need to appear as if they were dealing with the substance of things (as was sometimes the case with opportunists in the past), then they would make a show of engaging—even if crudely distorting—the actual substance of what BA and the new communism are about (as expressed at revcom.us as well as the Collected Works of Bob Avakian, and concentrated in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America). These opportunist attacks do not even put up a real pretense of doing that. Instead they rely on—and get over to the degree that they do because of—the putrid culture that prevails overall in society now, and far too much among those who consider themselves “progressive” or “left”: a culture that revels way too much in “snark”; a culture that has too much in common with the approach of the Trumpites, relying on things like “a lot of people really think, a lot of people are saying,” instead of the approach of seriously looking into serious things, examining what people and groups actually say and do, and determining how it relates to the reality that has to be confronted and where different outlooks and programs will lead if they are taken up and acted on.

It is not hard to recognize the likelihood of involvement in all this by operatives of the Democratic Party and the “mainstream” section of the ruling class, who are desperate to keep things within the confines, terms and “norms” of this system, even as this means accommodation with and capitulation to Trump/MAGA fascism and its all-around and accelerating enforcement of very real horrors for humanity.

In the face of all this, it is crucial to remain firmly grounded in and resolutely apply the basic principle that, as I emphasized in my social media message #129: “Irresponsible opportunist distortions should not be allowed to sabotage the unity of the millions needed to drive out the Trump fascist regime.” And they should not be allowed to sabotage and derail serious searching, discussion and debate in regard to critical questions such as: what has given rise to this fascism, and what should be brought forward as the positive alternative to this?

All this drives home the important point expressed in my social media message #119: “Democratic Party politicians may contribute to the crucial struggle against Trump/MAGA fascism—but the Democratic Party will not, and cannot, lead this struggle where it needs to go.”

The fundamental reason, once again, is that the Democrats are representatives of the same monstrous and moribund system as the fascists. This has been driven home, in terribly graphic terms, in the fact that the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party overall, has backed and aided Israel in the genocide it is perpetrating in Palestine, massively armed by the U.S., under both Democratic and Republican administrations. As sharply posed by a doctor who volunteered in Gaza and witnessed first-hand the awful consequences for the Palestinians there, including children, as a result of Israel’s relentless slaughter and massive destruction: what does it mean that there is no major political party in the U.S., neither Republican nor Democrat, for whom genocide is a “no go”?!

As I pointed out in my social media message #7:

Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

And from social media message #35:

Maintaining Israel as a “western-oriented” state is of decisive importance for the U.S. imperialists, and in turn the Zionist (Jewish supremacist) nature of Israel is of critical importance in maintaining Israel as this bastion of support for U.S. dominance, especially in opposition to the influence of Iran—and beyond that Russia, and increasingly China—in this strategic region.

And, while U.S. support for the apartheid and genocide perpetrated by Israel is a particularly grotesque example, the fact is that there is a whole long history of war crimes and crimes against humanity presided over by Democrats, as well as the Republicans—something which is extensively documented in the American Crime series and other works at revcom.us.

With all this, there remain very real, and very sharp, differences between different sectors of the ruling class, very significantly with regard to the maintenance of the U.S. empire and the “world order” that the U.S. has imposed and enforced with massive destructive violence since the end of World War 2, in 1945. These differences—and the fact that the ruling class of this country is deeply divided and cannot continue to rule as a unified ruling class—has definite significance in relation to the immediate and urgent necessity of driving out the Trump fascist regime (as I have spoken to in my social media message #141) and, beyond that, in relation to the fundamental necessity and goal of revolution, to abolish, uproot and move beyond this whole system of capitalism-imperialism.

At the same time, it is important to understand that the immediate problem with which we are confronted is not “authoritarianism,” or “oligarchy,” and the fundamental conflict is not “democracy vs. oligarchy” or “democracy vs. authoritarianism.”

To refer to my social media message #114:

The specific and essential thing that is represented and is being enforced by the Trump regime is not “oligarchy,” it is not “billionaires”: it is fascism.

Fascism is a qualitatively different way that this system enforces its rule over people....

As for “oligarchy” and “billionaires,” the Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party, receives heavy financing from the super-rich, heads of corporations, and so on. Even more fundamentally, both of these parties are instruments of the system of capitalism-imperialism, which is based on mercilessly exploiting billions of people, and enforcing literally murderous oppression of masses of people, here and all over the world. This is why the Democratic Party, and those who are tied to or aligned with it, will never challenge the rule of Trump the way that is necessary in order to actually defeat it. For these “mainstream” (or so-called “progressive”) representatives of this system of capitalism-imperialism, the stability of this system, and the dominant position of U.S. imperialism in the world, is of greater concern than actually defeating Trump/MAGA fascism.

(The formulation “authoritarianism,” and its misuse, is analyzed more extensively in one of my articles on the war in Ukraine available at revcom.us: Shameless American Chauvinism: “Anti-Authoritarianism” as a “Cover” for Supporting U.S. Imperialism, updated with an Added Note, June 5, 2023.)

To return to a crucial point in relation to all this: Bourgeois (that is, capitalist) “democracy” is actually a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (capitalist class).

This puts into proper perspective the opportunist accusation that we revcoms (advocates of the new communism) do not believe in—are opposed to—“democracy.” What these opportunists mean by “democracy” is, in reality, capitalist-imperialist rule, with the “democratic” capitalism-imperialism of “the good ole USA” dominating the world and preying on the people of the world. We are most definitely opposed to that. (What is involved here is very much related to why, decades ago now, I wrote a book with the deliberately provocative title, Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?)

The essence of the matter—in opposition to the fostering of illusions about the system in this country and its “great democracy”—is concentrated in these three sentences:

In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about “democracy”—without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves—is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no “democracy for all”: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.

Also very relevant here is the following from “Hope For Humanity,” in the section “Particular Interests and General Interests—Differing Class Interests and the Highest Interests of Humanity”:

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx makes the point that every class viewpoint identifies the particular interest of the class it represents with the general interests of society.

This is certainly true of the ruling capitalist class—the bourgeoisie—while it is also true of those expressing the viewpoint of the middle class (the petite bourgeoisie), which imagines itself “above” (or “outside”) the fundamental conflicts in society and strives spontaneously for a kind of “classless democracy,” for a form of government, that does not embody and serve the interests of any powerful dominating force in society—neither the exploiting capitalist class, nor the exploited class under the capitalist system, the proletariat, whose fundamental interests lie in completely abolishing all exploitation, and all oppression, everywhere, while the achievement of this emancipation must pass through an historic transition in which socialist rule, the dictatorship of the proletariat, serves the advance to the “4 Alls” which Marx identified as the goal of the communist revolution: the abolition of all class distinctions, all the production relations on which those class distinctions rest, all the social relations corresponding to those production relations, and the revolutionizing of all the ideas corresponding to those social relations.

This is an expression of the third of those three sentences on democracy: The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.

(How this eventual abolition can find living expression, in some qualitatively new ways, is embodied in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have authored.)

In light of this, it is worth examining a prominent fascist idiocy—which is shared, in basic terms, by all apologists of capitalism, whether fascist, “mainstream” or “progressive,” and is often expressed in this wrong-headed, simple-minded question: “When has communism ever worked?” (or the direct insistence that “communism has never worked”).

For example, the New York Times opinion writer Maureen Dowd’s “conservative” brother Kevin (to whom Maureen turns over her column once a year during the Thanksgiving period) baldly (I was going to say badly, but in any case baldly) asserted in this column (Sunday, November 30, 2025): “Socialism has never worked anywhere in the world.” He then adds: “Our country is built on capitalism, and that has served us well for almost 250 years”! Here is a striking example of the old saying that paper will put up with whatever is printed on it—no matter how crudely it distorts reality.

To take the last part first (“Our country is built on capitalism, and that has served us well for almost 250 years”), and leaving aside the question that is begged by this (“what do you mean by us, reactionary white man?”), the basic answer to this is the following (from my 2017 speech “The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!”):

The USA is a country which established its territory and built the foundation of its wealth through the armed conquest of land, genocide, slavery, and ruthless exploitation of successive waves of immigrants to America. And it has continued as a country marked by white supremacy, patriarchy and male supremacy, and other oppressive divisions, while expanding its domination into an empire stretching across the globe, sitting atop a lopsided world of profound inequalities and plunder of the environment (it would take the resources of nearly 5 earths for the rest of the world to have the kind of “consumer society” that exists in the U.S.)—all this backed up and enforced by a massive machinery of death and devastation, the U.S. military, and reinforced with a constant barrage of ideas and culture rationalizing and justifying all this oppression and destruction, propagated through an equally massive machinery of molding public opinion.

This has been built on the historically-established foundation of the capitalist system overall—which Marx captured in these graphic, powerfully ironic terms:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population,... the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

(Although coming from an ultimately bourgeois-democratic outlook, the book Goliath’s Curse contains considerable analysis of the terrible consequences of capitalist—as well as previous—empires.)

This historical foundation, and now the development of capitalism into capitalism-imperialism, with heightened globalization and the corresponding parasitism (feeding off the exploitation of people throughout the world, and intense super-exploitation in the Third World, involving more than 150 million children): this is the basis on which the capitalist system has “served well” the development of the U.S. economy and the ruling class of this country above all.

(This is analyzed in depth by Raymond Lotta in Imperialist Parasitism and Class-Social Recomposition in the U.S. From the 1970s to Today: An Exploration of Trends and Changes, available at revcom.us.)

As for that commonplace idiocy repeated by Kevin Dowd—that communism (or socialist society under the leadership of communists) “has never worked”—it would take more time and volume of material than is possible here to respond fully to this, but the following are some important elements of a refutation of this idiocy, and its simple-minded substitution of prejudiced ignorance in place of serious analysis. Here I am going to focus on some key aspects of the experience of socialist societies, led by communists, in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1956, before capitalism was restored there; and China from 1949 to 1976, when capitalism was restored there as well, after the death of Mao.

(For further important background to all this, there is the Interview with Raymond Lotta, You Don’t Know What You Think You “Know” About...The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future; and the interview with me The Cultural Revolution in China... Art and Culture... Dissent and Ferment...and Carrying Forward the Revolution Toward Communism.)

Briefly, on the experience of the Soviet Union. This was the first successful socialist revolution in the history of the world, which immediately was up against tremendous odds and obstacles. Almost immediately after the seizure of power by this revolution in 1917, the country was plunged into civil war, waged against this new liberating society by representatives of the old reactionary oppressive society, including capitalists, major landowners, reactionary generals and so on. (And these reactionary forces were aided by a number of capitalist-imperialist countries, including the U.S.) The result of all this was that several million people died and the country was plunged into terrible poverty.

This was what the Soviet Union faced as the revolution succeeded in consolidating power at the end of that decade and going into the 1920s. And tremendous gains were made, tremendous liberating transformations—the development of the economy (which I’ll talk about a little bit more); the liberation of women, including the right to abortion (the Soviet Union was the first modern country to legalize abortion—and this sharply contrasted with the U.S. then, for example); major advances in overcoming poverty, illiteracy and the influence of religious obscurantism among the masses of people, particularly in the countryside; a real florescence in art and culture. All this marked the development of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and into the early 1930s.

There was also the development of the economy in the 1930s. Much as they don’t like to talk about it, the fact is that, while the entire capitalist world was plunged into the Great Depression which lasted the entire decade of the 1930s, the Soviet economy forged ahead, transforming the country economically in major ways. But there were problems with this, some of which Mao pointed out. There was too much emphasis on the development of heavy industry as opposed to all-around development of both agriculture and light industry as well as heavy industry. This continued, and even in some ways accentuated, the difference which can be an oppressive difference, between the city and the countryside and the people living in those two places.

And beginning in the 1930s, while the economy rolled ahead, there was a reversal of some of the major social transformations that had been taking place, including the reversal of the right to abortion. This flowed to a certain degree from Stalin’s statement (Stalin who was the head of the Soviet Union at the time), his statement in the early 1930s that either we catch up with the economies of the imperialist world or they will destroy us. (That’s a paraphrase, but it’s the essence of the viewpoint he put forward.) This guided the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

But, even more specifically, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, there was, in response to a major development in the world, a significant change. This took place especially around 1934. The big change in the world, and not just in the particular country, was the triumph of fascism in Germany, which was a major imperialist power—and which under Hitler from the beginning had identified the Soviet Union as a major enemy, and did, after a short period of an agreement, launch a full scale invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing war resulted in the death of somewhere around 25 million people in the Soviet Union—which, by the way, is 50 times the number of deaths of Americans in World War 2.

It was on the basis of this very significant development—with the triumph of fascism in Germany and the threat it posed to the Soviet Union—it was especially on this basis that things became much more repressive in the Soviet Union. (This also followed the attempt by the Soviet Union, in the mid-1930s, to form a united front against fascist Germany with non-fascist imperialist countries, in particular Britain and France—an effort that was rejected by those countries.) In this situation, during the second half of the 1930s, Stalin increasingly would not allow and moved to repress any kind of opposition, and confounded the difference between criticism and actual enemy action and sabotage. A lot of people were wrongly caught up in this repression, even though all this has been greatly distorted by the apologists and mouthpieces of the imperialist system.

Through World War 2, with all the death and destruction in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was—contrary to what we are constantly told in this country—the major force in defeating German Nazi imperialism. Its defeat of Germany in the battle of Stalingrad in the Soviet Union, some few years into the war, broke the back of the Nazi war machine and constituted the major turning point in World War 2 overall.

So, the Soviet Union played this crucial role in defeating the fascists. But on what basis? Here, there are some important negative things to sum up. The war was waged crudely on the basis of rather old-line Russian patriotism, including the singling out of the Great Russian people as the first among the Soviet peoples. And so, coming out of that war, the question of where that society was going to go was sharply posed. Socialism had been significantly compromised in the context of waging and ultimately winning this war. No one should underestimate the tremendous challenge this war and the invasion of the Soviet Union by this Nazi war machine actually represented. Nonetheless, the question of socialism was up for grabs, so to speak, in the period coming out of World War 2. And before long, shortly after the death of Stalin, this contradiction between socialism and old-line nationalism and ultimately capitalism was resolved with the restoration of capitalism under the leadership of Khruschev in the mid-1950s.

It is also important to underline the profound contrast between the situation of the Soviet Union coming out of World War 2 with that of the United States: Once again, the Soviet Union suffered massive destruction and the huge loss of life through that war, with a major front of that war fought on Soviet territory, while war was never fought on U.S. territory and it emerged greatly strengthened through the war. This placed the U.S. at a great advantage in what became a global contest between the U.S. imperialist empire and the emerging Soviet imperialist empire over the next number of decades, until the Soviet Union “came unraveled” by the early 1990s, with a diminished and weakened Russia remaining in its place.

But, returning to the whole idea that “socialism, communism has never worked,” you can see that put to the lie just by what I have briefly outlined here—how this claim is a crude distortion of very rich and important history that people need to learn about. Think about what it would mean if, in this country, something like 50 million people died as a result of a war fought on the soil of this country! How repressive would the government be that waged the war to defeat that invasion (with whatever particular form of warfare it was). This is the kind of situation the Soviet Union experienced as a socialist society through World War 2. And this whole experience of socialism in the Soviet Union has to be evaluated with this historical perspective—from the beginning, from the initial seizure of power, all the way up through World War 2, and with the threat of attack by an atomic bomb-armed U.S. coming out of World War 2.

Here I can make a very controversial statement. So far there has only been one country that has used nuclear weapons—the U.S., with its atomic bombing of two Japanese cities at the end of World War 2 in 1945—only one country has done it and that country only did it once. But certainly it has to be considered whether one of the main reasons that the U.S. didn’t do it more than once is the fact that the Soviet Union also developed atomic weapons shortly after the end of World War 2, and a whole different question got raised about the use of nuclear weapons—even though the U.S. imperialists drew up plans to wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union and China, calculating that this would cost the lives of several hundred million people! This is the nature of these imperialists that we’re dealing with, who bray about how capitalism has been so great for them and how “socialism and communism has never worked,” as they’ve worked forever not to allow it to “work,” and even with all the great advances it has broken through in the face of that.

So let’s look next at China. We hear so much slander of Mao and the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in particular—once again, conscious, or at least ignorant, idiocy. What, after all, were the objectives of Mao and the Chinese communists in waging the revolution? What was the situation of the masses of people in China that established the necessity for a revolution and made masses of people supportive of the revolution? The terrible conditions in the countryside, where people regularly starved in the millions; where families had to sell their children, and in particular their young girls, to landlords and others to be exploited and sexually plundered, just in order to try to have a meager existence for the rest of the family; where there were terrible diseases and epidemics that regularly struck China, owing to the backward conditions of the country.

There was the situation in the cities where masses of people were working as exploited proletarians—where the situation of the exploited workers, the proletarians in the factories, was one of desperate conditions as well. Even attempts at trade union organizing by these workers were met with vicious, murderous repression by the ruling regime backed up by the imperialists, the ruling regime headed then by Chiang Kai-shek.

This was in the context of the overall domination of China by imperialism, with all of its different effects, including in the cultural realm, where Mao made the striking statement one time that this imperialist domination and the subordination of the Chinese people was so extreme that it could be said that if a foreigner farted in China, there was always some Chinese who could be found to say that it smelled good. But in a more serious expression of this—emblematic of the larger situation, a concentration of it—was the fact that there was a sign in a major park in Shanghai: “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed.” In a major city of China.

This is what the revolution was aimed at overcoming—and did, in really marvelous ways, overcome—eliminating scourges like drug addiction on a massive scale, diseases and epidemics that had plagued the country for decades and centuries. You can read the Pearl Buck novels about China and see some of the conditions I’m talking about.

Tremendous advances were made in developing the economy. It’s always talked about how many people Mao supposedly killed—and contests to up the numbers from so many millions, to so many times that millions, to so many times that. But think about all the lives that were saved during the period of socialism led by the Chinese Communist Party and Mao. To cite one very meaningful statistic: At the time the revolution came to power in 1949, the average life expectancy was 32 years; and at the time of Mao’s death, less than three decades later, it had risen to 65. The infant mortality rate at that time in the city of Shanghai—remember Shanghai? “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed”—the infant mortality rate in Shanghai at that time was lower than it was in New York City.

So this is expressive of some of the major gains that were made, including the emancipation of women. The elimination of foot binding, where the feet of a woman were forcibly turned under, causing them to have to wobble when walking, making them supposedly more desirable to men. This practice was eliminated.

All these things were eliminated, not by state repression, but by mobilizing the masses of people, including the mass campaigns against disease, against drug addiction, against prostitution, where the people were not victimized and persecuted who had been caught up in this, but there was education and struggle carried out and they were given a new lease on life in a real sense to become productive members of society. Tremendous gains were made—and it’s just disgusting the slander against this and the ignorance that is promoted.

Similarly about the Cultural Revolution. You could have a lot of fun in a certain sense by asking all these people who spread all this garbage about China and Mao: What was the actual aim of the Cultural Revolution? What policy did Mao foster and further during the course of the Cultural Revolution? What was the actual course of the Cultural Revolution? “Blu, blu blub, blub, bluh...” That’s the content and substance of the answer you would get from all these people crudely slandering China—the revolution and in particular the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was a mass uprising—yes, led by Mao and elements in the Chinese Communist Party who were on the revolutionary road. But it involved a swirl of debate and struggle, overwhelmingly not violent; and when there was violence, this was opposed by Mao and directives were issued to counter it and steps taken to prevent it and to bring things back to the course of mass debate. And, yes, there were some excesses. There has never been a truly mass upheaval in the world that has not involved some excesses. But it’s not as if Mao were fanning and encouraging the excesses. He was moving to direct people away from them and to get things back on the course that they needed to be on.

In the major cities hundreds, literally hundreds, of mass newspapers were produced by the masses of people rising up and debating the questions of socialism and what road forward for China, and so on. This was the essence of the Cultural Revolution.

And one of the real ironies of the Cultural Revolution—which, of course, all these idiots don’t know anything about or choose to ignore—is this: one important aspect of the Cultural Revolution is that it was an attempt by Mao to deal with the threat to socialism, to deal with the moves to overthrow socialism and restore capitalism, coming from within the Party and the state itself, to counter this and oppose it and defeat it by means other than the kind of massive purges carried out by Stalin in the Soviet Union. Mao had summed up that experience, and the mass struggle of the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s means to take on this problem of forces moving to restore capitalism and the question of transforming the people and their basic values, in a different way than state repression. That’s one of the great ironies of all the vicious attacks on the Cultural Revolution.

During the course of the Cultural Revolution, another great achievement was the creation of revolutionary art and culture, really for the first time in history, on this scale and with the actual backing of a government, with one of its outstanding features women playing a prominent role as revolutionaries, not as playthings for men.

So this was a real struggle which had come to a head in China over which road to take—the road of socialism or the road of capitalism—and, as I said, there were powerful forces within the Chinese Communist Party who were determined to take the country on the road of capitalism, whose involvement even in the Communist Party was always more—was never so much, I should say—actually wanting to advance society on the road of socialism and ultimately the world toward communism, with the abolition of exploitation and oppression, but was really centered on making China a great powerful country.

And for a while, during certain stages of the communist revolution, those viewpoints could somewhat coexist within the leadership of the revolution; but then, once the foreign yoke had been thrown off and the question of, yes, how do you develop the economy and develop the country as a whole came to the fore, those viewpoints increasingly came in conflict with each other. There were those who said, like Deng Xiaoping: “What does it matter whether it’s a black cat or a white cat as long as it catches mice?”—meaning: who cares whether we use capitalist methods or socialist methods, capitalist methods are fine as long as this develops the economy.

Another one of the ironies here is that a slander of Mao commonly repeated by so-called scholars of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and so on, is that Mao “invented” this danger of capitalist restoration in order to purge a whole bunch of people and carry out repression, so as to further assert himself as the unquestioned leader.

Well here are the facts: Mao said there are forces in the Chinese Communist Party who are moving to restore capitalism, that’s why we need a cultural revolution to defeat them as well as to further transform things on the revolutionary road, including the thinking of the people. The political objective was to defeat this move on the part of powerful forces inside the party and the state to restore capitalism. Supposedly Mao “invented” this danger so he could be an even more powerful tyrant. Well the simple fact is this: what these people have done, beginning with Deng Xiaoping after the death of Mao, is exactly what Mao said they were going to do—exactly moving to restore capitalism in China. And here we see that, once again, what was really at stake was two different roads. Not as an abstraction but how—by what means, on what road—do you, for example, develop the economy, as was recognized generally as a very important goal of the revolution: to develop the economy, to lift the country out of the remaining poverty for masses of people.

Here I can tell a little story. When I visited China in 1971 we went to a dinner, the delegation I was part of, we went to a dinner in Shanghai. And one of the leading people there in Shanghai hosted this dinner for us. Well, prior to this dinner he had regaled us for nearly an hour with statistics about how they were developing the economy in Shanghai and contributing to the overall development of the economy in China. This was not some sort of soulless bureaucrat. During the course of the dinner, for example, the same guy—we had some crab for dinner, and the same guy at one point proclaimed humorously, “The person who invented crabs is a genius!” Now this is not your typical dogmatic communist, or your faceless bureaucratic official. But the reason that we were given such a rundown on the development of the economy was because of all the slanders that the people—Mao and others— who wanted to stay on the revolutionary road, and Shanghai was then a stronghold of that, supposedly they didn’t care about developing the economy; they just wanted to wage “class struggle” and persecute people, and so on and so forth.

So what was at stake was not whether or not to develop the economy, it was on what road. And toward what end? Do you develop the economy on the basis of re-establishing and restoring capitalism and its principles of development—which means basically exploiting people within your country and ultimately internationally? Or do you do it on the basis of moving to overcome exploitation and the profound differences that accompany exploitation—such as the difference between the countryside and the city, where the city tends to dominate the countryside, be more privileged if you will, and the difference between the people living in the two places; the difference between mental and manual labor, between people who work mainly in the realm of ideas and those who work with their backs, mainly. Do you do it in a way that’s moving to overcome these great differences, as well as the differences in income and so on, that are part of that whole picture? Or do you do it by just unleashing all those differences fully?—which is the path China has taken after the death of Mao and with the restoration of capitalism beginning in late 1976.

A lot of talk is made—here’s an irony—all these people who say “socialism has never worked, communism has never worked”: they’ll acknowledge, on the other hand, that China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; and that’s under a system that these idiots call “communism,” even though it’s not—even though the Chinese Communist Party continues to be the ruling party, it has long since abandoned any objectives of continuing to transform society and the world toward communism. So here is the big irony on the part of people who say, “communism and socialism have never worked”: this Communist Party-led country in China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Another kind of irony here is that, even though the ruling class in power in China, since shortly after the death of Mao in 1976, is capitalist, and definitely not “communist,” the foundation on which they have carried out capitalist development was actually built through the development of the economy on a socialist basis, during the period of Mao’s leadership. Without that, China would have remained a backward, deeply impoverished country. At the same time, the restoration of capitalism in China has been accompanied by the re-emergence of profound inequalities and terrible social ills, such as prostitution; and accompanying all this, in the realm of ideology and culture, the slogan “to get rich is glorious” has been promoted in place of the principle popularized in socialist China, with Mao’s leadership: “serve the people.”

Now, let’s speak to this. If the path that Mao charted, the revolutionary path, had been continued, would that have meant that people would not have been lifted out of poverty? Perhaps it would have taken a little longer. But China’s economy was already rapidly developing—that’s reflected in what I cited about the life expectancy. That reflects the development of the economy, or else that could not have happened. And by the way, that was happening while the population was expanding not contracting. They didn’t kill off a bunch of poor people so the life expectancy would be statistically higher. The population was expanding while the life expectancy was doubling. So if they had continued on the road that Mao was fighting for, and those who were with him, they would have also lifted millions, hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—but on a different road. It wouldn’t have been a road of China being a great power exploiting people around the world, in Africa and other parts of the world, as it is doing under the rule of these phony communist— actual capitalist—rulers of China.

So, if you look at the actual experience which I’ve only been able to briefly sketch here—and people should look into it more fully in the works I’ve cited, including the interviews with Raymond Lotta and myself, and see what they were actually up against and what they actually achieved—you can see the complete, yes I’ll say it once again, idiocy, and deliberate fostering or, in any case consistent fostering, of ignorance, to deny people who are feeling the weight of living under this system and hungering for something better: to deny them the whole knowledge of this experience and therefore the understanding that there could be a real alternative.

At the same time, I’ve spoken to some shortcomings, and even some very serious errors in the overall experience of socialist society led by communists—and yes, I’ve used the word “grievous” in speaking of errors on the part of Stalin in particular, but also some significant problems with Mao’s leadership, some shortcomings in Mao’s orientation and approach. For example, through the Cultural Revolution there was recognition of the importance of ferment and debate, carried out as it was on a grand scale, through the Cultural Revolution (as I’ve briefly described here). But the scope of this was still too restricted. It was still too much on the terms of: If you want to get anywhere in this debate, it has to be conducted on the basis of upholding Mao’s leadership and you’re for the socialist road, while those who are opposing you are not. It wasn’t as open-ended and as broad-based a debate as it needed to be.

This was also reflected in the realm of art and culture, even with the very great breakthroughs and tremendous achievements that I briefly described. There was, again, a certain constriction of art and culture to revolutionary themes and not enough florescence and ironically not enough flowering of different tendencies in art, and for that matter, not enough support for art that wasn’t directly political—even while revolutionary art, art that’s directly promoting the revolution, including in the most artistic way, is very important. But there was a certain limitation there and a certain constricture in terms of what would get backing at least.

In the more philosophical dimension, if you will, there was a certain “reification” of the oppressed masses: the common view that had influence, was actually being promoted there, that the oppressed masses by the very nature of their position had, as the current parlance puts it, a particular purchase on the truth—or at least that they would be spontaneously more inclined toward striving for revolution. Now it’s true that where there’s oppression, there’s resistance—but that doesn’t spontaneously lead to people understanding where that resistance needs to go, how it needs to develop into revolution, what’s the character of that revolution and how to deal with the problems of the revolution. All that requires science—it doesn’t reside just in the oppressed masses by virtue of their oppressed condition.

So there was this tendency, which included the idea of “class truth”—as opposed to objective truth. The idea that for the proletariat and other oppressed people there was a truth that corresponded to their interests, and opposed to that a “truth” that corresponded to the interests of their exploiters and oppressors, so you had to go with the “proletarian truth” not the “bourgeois truth.” This is in opposition to the scientific understanding that truth does not have a class character. Truth can be wielded on behalf of a class, but truth itself does not have a class character—it has an objective character. Truth resides in, or represents, an accurate reflection and concentration of objective reality—not the subjective viewpoint of this or that class, whether bourgeois or proletarian.

At the same time, there was, on the part of Mao and that party generally, a sort of an eclectic mix of communism as the main guiding outlook and method, yet secondarily, but significantly, this was mixed in with a fair amount of nationalism. This is understandable, in a certain sense, given the whole oppressed history of China as a country, as a nation (Mao’s sharp comment, which I referred to, and the more brute example of the sign in the park in Shanghai, speak to that). Nevertheless, the outlook of communists has to be internationalist and not nationalist. Yes, you apply that to particular conditions, but the outlook and the overall approach has to be internationalist not nationalist, yet there was kind of an eclectic mix, including in Mao. This was also reflected in the realm of culture, where one of the guidelines that was promoted was “have foreign things serve China.” And this really went to a bad place with a rejection of some “foreign culture” that was actually quite positive, such as jazz and rock and roll in the U.S. then (the 1960s and early 1970s), which was criticized as essentially decadent by the dominant line in China at that time.

This negative nationalist tendency came out very dramatically when, in the early 1970s, with the leadership of Mao, China adopted a policy of the opening to the West—identifying the Soviet Union as the main enemy (a Soviet Union which, again, had since the mid 1950s, been a capitalist country and had developed into a powerful capitalist-imperialist country, but in the name of communism). The Soviet Union was posing a direct threat of invading and even using nuclear weapons against China in the1960s, particularly the late 1960s. In the face of that, in the early 1970s, Mao and the Chinese party adopted a policy of “opening to the West.” In other words, seeking certain relations and even a certain kind of alliance with the U.S. in particular, in order to deal particularly with the threat of the Soviet Union. But this led to all kinds of terrible policies and actions on the part of the Chinese government, including supporting people like Marcos in the Philippines, a brutal oppressor kept in power by U.S. imperialism for a long time. The irony was that there was actually a Maoist revolutionary force waging armed struggle against the Marcos regime in the Philippines—and yet the Chinese Party, as part of this opening to the West, was supporting the Marcos government.

There are many other examples of this. Some of it became rather—well, I’ll use the word, disgusting. I read some of the things that have been retrieved from discussions that Mao held with Henry Kissinger, representing the U.S. government, during this period of the opening to the West in the 1970s, and in these discussions it’s almost hard to distinguish Mao as a communist, to be blunt. So this was an extension of the view that you had to maneuver in this way to deal with the threat of the Soviet Union. The point is not to be dogmatic. It’s one thing if you make tactical alliances even with imperialists—if you don’t compromise fundamental principles. But, unfortunately, too much fundamental principle was compromised as part of this. I can’t go into this more fully here, but it’s a very important experience that needs to be seriously confronted and scientifically dealt with.

So, that’s some important discussion of the historical experience of communism, in particular socialist society led by communists, in the Soviet Union and China. In a real sense, the major work of mine, Breakthroughs: The Historic Breakthrough by Marx, and the Further Breakthrough with the New Communism, A Basic Summary provides a bridge from the historical experience of the communist movement to the further synthesis with the new communism. (Later in this presentation, I will come back to a discussion of some of the key elements of the new communism as a continuation of, but also a qualitative leap beyond, and in some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed. And in a two-part interview with me in early 2025—available at revcom.us and thebobavakianinstitute.org—I discussed more fully the basic principles and methods of the new communism.)

But here it is important to come back to this essential point: Once the possibility of a really radical and truly emancipating alternative—a fundamentally different system and way to live, as represented by the communist revolution—once this is closed off, in reality and in people’s minds, all kinds of horrors will continue, and sooner or later those whose minds have been closed to this emancipating alternative will become complicit in, or at least accommodate to, those horrors, one way or another. This is expressed in particularly acute terms now, in the situation where this system is running up against its limits—something which I have spoken to here (and discussed more fully in other places, including my social media message #118.)

But let’s look further at the contradictions of capitalism. Lenin made this very important observation about capitalism and its effect on people who live under the capitalist system: He noted that capitalism forces people to calculate with the stinginess of a miser. You can think about everyday experience and what people are put through. There is not just some inherent human nature of selfishness. The operation of this system constantly pits people against each other in all kinds of ways, and forces them to compete with other people for jobs, for promotions, for admission to college, and on and on. And this does, as Lenin said, foster this tendency to calculate with the stinginess of a miser: “How am I doing vs. all these other people who are competing with me? How am I advancing?” And there are real things at stake. It’s not just people’s careerism in many cases—especially among the more oppressed and exploited masses it’s literally a matter of survival, or at least being able to some way provide for those who depend on you in many cases. So it’s important to understand: It isn’t just that capitalism gives rise to a flourishing of this calculating with the stinginess of a miser—it compels people, as Lenin said, to calculate with the stinginess of a miser.

To draw once again from “Hope For Humanity”:

Here is a very important statement by Marx, from the Grundrisse—one of his major works—as cited in Ruminations and Wranglings:

In the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, of distinctions of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up (at least, personal ties all appear as personal relations); and individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifference), free to collide with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom....

This is a way of elaborating on what Lenin was pointing to in emphasizing that capitalism forces people to calculate with the stinginess of a miser. Particularly important in this statement by Marx is the analysis that this “independence” of people under capitalism is really “an illusion,” which “is more correctly called indifference.” It is often celebrated about capitalism that it gives qualitatively greater scope to the individual than systems like feudalism (to say nothing of outright slavery), where the positions and the restraints on individuals are much more fixed and frozen. Marx is getting at the fact that, while this is a real difference with feudalism, it is nevertheless the case that, within the exchange relations of capitalism (fundamentally rooted in its economic/production relations) the “independence” of individuals is not nearly as real, or as expansive, as it appears, and in the end it is essentially illusory: people are still confined within and conditioned by the fundamental relations of the system.

And the “indifference”—the “not caring,” particularly about other people—relates to the competition between individuals (“free to collide with one another”) under capitalism and the way that, as Lenin put it, this system compels people to calculate with the stinginess of a miser.

There’s all this talk—what we could readily identify as tautological talk, round in a circle reasoning—about human nature. And this was also spoken to by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Marx made the point that the development of society involves the continuous transformation of human nature. So whatever is the prevailing system of social and economic relations, and their corresponding ideas and culture and political system, will be the dominating character of “human nature.” In other words, the philosophy or the ideology and the morals of people. “Compelled to calculate with the stinginess of a miser” under capitalism—they made the point, Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, that this is another tautology, another round in the circle argument, that really amounts to saying that under the capitalist system (I’m paraphrasing but this is the essence of it) under the capitalist system, the dominant viewpoint that prevails will be one in correspondence with the capitalist system. Or, as they put it in that work: The ruling ideas of any age are always the ideas of the ruling class.

As I said, Marx made the point that the development of human society and its transformation involves the continuous transformation of human nature—that there is no such thing as unchanging “human nature,” but what is called human nature is ideas, attitudes, outlooks, morals, and so on, that are shaped by the prevailing system. Which people can and do rebel against, but nevertheless, those are going to remain the dominant ideas in the society so long as the society is dominated by a ruling class whose interests lie in promoting those ideas. So this is something very important to understand in opposition to the whole...you know people always say “well, it’s just human...”—if they don’t say “it’s god’s will,” they say it’s human nature, or they say both. And this, of course, is a shackle on people, keeps people from recognizing the possibility of real change, fundamental change. (I speak to this question of “human nature” more fully in my social media message #21: “There is no such thing as ‘human nature.’”)

Now I referred to “Ruminations And Wranglings,” which is an important work of mine, and the full title is: Ruminations And Wranglings, On the Importance of Marxist Materialism (something I’ll come back to), Communism as a Science, Meaningful Revolutionary Work, and a Life with Meaning. The specific reference here is to the section, “More on Individuals and Social Relations,” which contains important discussion of this question of individualism and the contradiction between people’s existence as individuals and as part of fundamental economic and other social relations.

This is a basic contradiction of bourgeois (capitalist) society—and in fact of all societies, but this takes a particularly pronounced expression in capitalist society: people obviously exist as individuals, while at the same time they are part of larger social relations, most fundamentally production relations, and under capitalist society that’s production relations and social relations of exploitation and oppression.

Further from “Hope For Humanity” on this contradiction:

As I have pointed out, in Ruminations and Wranglings (and in other works), the contradiction that people exist as individuals, but they also exist in a larger social context and are largely shaped by that social context, is a complicated contradiction that is important to handle correctly. And this contradiction is acutely expressed today in the fact that while people do exist as individuals, the terrible suffering of the masses of humanity and the urgent challenges facing humanity as a whole as a result of the escalating destruction of the environment by this system of capitalism-imperialism as well as the possibility of nuclear conflagration that continues to loom as an existential threat over humanity—all this cannot be seriously addressed, let alone actually solved, by each person pursuing their particular individual interests, and in fact people acting in this way constitutes a major obstacle to bringing about the necessary solution.

It’s worth repeating this part: this contradiction is acutely expressed today in the fact that while people do exist as individuals, the terrible suffering of the masses of humanity and the urgent challenges facing humanity as a whole as a result of the escalating destruction of the environment by this system of capitalism-imperialism as well as the possibility of nuclear conflagration that continues to loom as an existential threat over humanity—all this cannot be seriously addressed, let alone actually solved, by each person pursuing their particular individual interests, and in fact people acting in this way constitutes a major obstacle to bringing about the necessary solution. (Continuing the quote from “Hope For Humanity”)

Individualism is a significant factor and “unifying element” in much of the negative trends that play a major role in keeping people from recognizing the reality and depth of the horrors continually brought about by this system—and recognizing the urgent need to act, together with others, to abolish and uproot all this, at its very source. This highlights and heightens the fact that individualism, which is encouraged and expressed in extreme forms in this particular society at this time, is a profound problem that must be confronted and transformed.

With the extreme parasitism of this country, and (to borrow a phrase from Marx), the culture conditioned thereby, it is hardly surprising that extreme individualism is extensively promoted and constitutes a serious obstacle to positive social transformation.

What compounds the problem is that the “workings”—the dynamics as well as relations and institutions—of this system work to create the conditions in which “in normal times” there is not just a definite “spontaneous” inclination, but a strong material necessity and compulsion, for individuals to act on the basis of their own individual interests (and those in their close circle). It is in rare times and circumstances of serious crisis for the system and disruption of the “normal functioning” of society, that the basis comes into being for masses of people to act more broadly in the interests of larger concerns. And, once again, this is one of those rare times and circumstances.

Along with the individualism so characteristic of this society is the problem of infantilism (the infantilization of younger and even somewhat older adults—treating and conditioning them to think and act like dependent, and in some cases pampered, children, even as they are often burdened with the “expectation” that they must “succeed” according to the terms and standards of this system—a real “toxic combination”) along with the widely promoted philistinism: a disregard for or disgust with knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge (serious knowledge, as opposed to rumors and gossip). Or, in other words, just plain dumbing down, including through the influence of much of social media.

“Woke identity politics” is in effect a species of individualism: The individualism is extended to the “identity” of which one is a part (a race, gender, etc.) while the different “identities” are posed (objectively and in many cases consciously) in opposition to each other, despite attempts by some to overcome this through “intersectionality” of different identities. This is expressed, in terms of epistemology (theory of knowledge) with the notion that each “identity” has its own particular “truth.”

As I discuss in “Breakthroughs,” in a society like the U.S., based as it is on exploitation and oppression: “The ruling class repeatedly seeks to pit different sections of the people against each other and, contrary to the illusions of ‘intersectionality,’ the ruling class has many powerful ways to do that if you’re not proceeding from the point of view of the emancipation of humanity as a whole,” but rather from the standpoint of different “identities.”

In opposition to all this, as emphasized, again, in my January 2021 New Year’s statement:

To understand why we are confronted with the situation we are, it is necessary not merely to respond to—and in effect be whipped around by—what is happening on the surface at any given time, but to dig beneath the surface, to discover the underlying mainsprings and causes of things, and arrive at an understanding of the fundamental problem and the actual solution. This means coming to the scientific understanding that we are living under a system, and what that system actually is (the system of capitalism-imperialism); working to grasp the deeper relations and dynamics of this system and how this is setting the framework for how different sections of society spontaneously think and react to events in society and the world; and what is the possible way forward to transforming all of this in the interests of the masses of humanity and ultimately humanity as a whole.

And:

This means fully breaking with and moving beyond an approach of merely embracing truths—or supposed truths—with which one is comfortable, while rejecting, dismissing, or evading actual truth which may make one uncomfortable. One important dimension of this is rising above and repudiating methodologically the philosophical relativism of “identity politics,” which does a great deal of harm through its own version of reducing “truth” to partial, unsystematized experience and subjective sentiment (“my truth”...“our truth”...) in opposition to real, objective truth, which is correctly, scientifically arrived at through an evidence-based process, to determine whether, or not, something (an idea, theory, assertion, etc.) corresponds to actual material reality. While politically this “identity politics” may be proceeding from a desire to oppose various forms of oppression—even if this is often characterized, and vitiated, by people of different “identities” seeking to claim “ownership” of opposition to oppression—in terms of epistemology (the approach to understanding reality and arriving at the truth of things) “identity politics” has a lot in common with the reliance on “alternative facts” (assertions that are in opposition to actual facts, often wildly so) that is the hallmark of the fascists. Even as it is important to recognize the political distinctions involved, the situation is far too serious, and the stakes far too high, to allow ourselves to fall into, or conciliate with, any form of opposing the scientific method and its pursuit of objective truth about actual reality.

Closely related to the flawed epistemology of “identity politics,” in opposition to the scientific method and its pursuit of objective truth about actual reality, is “post-modernist” insistence that it is not possible to arrive at objective truth, and even that there is no such thing as objective truth. This is refuted at some length in “Breakthroughs,” while the following from my article “Philosophy And Revolution,” Part 1 also provides important refutation of this:

Ultimately, the test of any theory, etc., is whether or not what it projects about reality is borne out (or not). At the same time, a scientific theory, correctly wielded, can—on the basis of accumulated historical experience and knowledge—accurately project what would likely result from a developing trajectory of things. This, for example, is the basis on which climate scientists can make essentially correct projections about what will develop from historical and current trends. And this is why it can be scientifically asserted that the overthrow of capitalism, and its replacement by communism, is in the fundamental interests of the masses of humanity, and ultimately humanity as a whole.

At the same time—and far more dangerous than “identity politics” and its flawed epistemology—is the attack on intellectualism (and even on certain expressions of individualism) by fascist “intellectuals” (such as JD Vance, and a number of tech billionaires, rightly described by someone as the “tech reich,” referring to the Nazi third reich) in the service of today’s fascism, “U.S. style.”

Along with all this, within “movements” opposing (or posturing as opponents of) the existing political system, (with some claiming to be opposed to capitalism—but, don’t actually know what capitalism is, as I put it in my social media message #38), there is what I refer to as PIE: Parasitic Imperialist Economism.

This is an approach to politics—and specifically electoral politics—that argues for backing and elevating people running in the Democratic Party on a platform of “affordability” as the pivot, with other, social (or “cultural”) issues as essentially secondary accompaniments to that.

As an explanation of the essential, and fundamental, problem with this approach, there is the following (from “Breakthroughs”):

As Marx pointed out, one of the distinguishing features of reformists—including reformist “socialists”—is that, insofar as they identify the economy as the source of inequality and other social maladies, they tend to locate the problem in the sphere of distribution, whereas the fundamental source of the oppression and inequality that characterize an exploitative society, such as capitalism, resides in the sphere of production, and more specifically the relations of production.

In today’s world, these production relations are fundamentally international relations, with the wealth that reformists seek to “re-distribute” (through increasing taxes on the super-rich, etc.) resting on the extreme parasitism of “the U.S. economy” as an international system of exploitation and super-exploitation. Along with that—and along with the fact that much of this “economist” program would actually undermine the functioning of this system and the competitive position of U.S. imperialism in the world—is this awful truth that may be ignored but cannot be avoided in reality:

At his rallies against “Oligarchy,” Bernie Sanders has revived the “Occupy” formula of the “99 percent” against the “one percent” of super-rich. But the problem is that nearly half of the “99 percent” are fascists. Why? Because, as I have pointed out before, it is not just their economic position but also their social position that they are worked up about. For the ranks of the MAGA fascists, even beyond their economic situation, a powerful, perverse motivating factor is their insistence on white supremacy and male supremacy, hatred of LGBT people and of immigrants (especially immigrants from “shithole countries,” in Trump’s disgusting racist terms). This is what these fascists mean by “Make America Great Again.” And all this is wrapped up with and driven by blatant lies, anti-scientific lunacy and crazed conspiracy theories—with vulnerable groups made into targets of hatred and persecution, like immigrants denounced as “dangerous criminals” and trans people treated as perverted predators. [This is from my social media message #114.]

With the development and heightening of capitalism into capitalism-imperialism, Lenin spoke to the consequences of this for the revolutionary movement in what he wrote about Imperialism and the Split in Socialism. He talked about how with this development of what we would today recognize as the parasitism of imperialism (in fact that was Lenin’s term, gotta be fair to Lenin, Lenin was the one who talked about parasitism, excuse me) anyway, with the parasitism of imperialism, Lenin recognized that there was a section of the working class that was bribed from the spoils of this parasitic imperialism, and more or less bourgeoisified. Now, he didn’t write them off totally in terms of the revolution—he said that with the development of events, we’ll see where different parts of these bourgeoisified workers fall out—but he emphasized the importance of building the revolutionary movement in the lower and deeper sections, the more bitterly exploited sections of the working class, of the proletariat.

But in these social democrats today, like the DSA—Democratic Socialists of America—we see once again the attempt to actually build a movement based on imperialist parasitism; that is the heart of their “affordability” appeal. It’s not that the conditions of the masses of people, even in the middle class, let alone the bitterly exploited, should be ignored. It’s not that there are not real problems with that. But to try to base a movement to change society on “affordability” means that the changes you’re seeking are going to be very limited and are ultimately going to be incorporated within this parasitic imperialist system. So this is a fundamental distinction between social-democrats like the DSA, who are basically a part of and seeking to take over the Democratic Party as an instrument of imperialist rule, on the one hand, versus actual socialism and its ultimate aim of communism throughout the world.

The basic and profound truth is that this system of capitalism-imperialism cannot be “reformed”—it cannot somehow be made into a just system acting in the interests of the masses of humanity.

This system rests on, and cannot do without, vicious exploitation, here and (super) exploitation around the world, particularly in the Third World (Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia).

It is rapidly destroying the environment, at an accelerating pace.

It is once again propelling things toward the existential threat of nuclear war.

In this country itself, very real and literally murderous oppression is built into the dominant system and its essential relations: white supremacy, patriarchy and male supremacy and other savage inequalities and brutal oppression.

And now, as a perverse attempt to preserve the rule of this system and the dominance of U.S. imperialism in the world, there is the rise to power of fascism. This involves what is, in essence, a “revival” (or, continuation) of the Confederacy: along with the “resurrecting” of Confederate monuments and “heroes,” there is even talk by fascists that slavery was not such a bad thing, was even a good thing. This fascism also prominently involves attacks on Trans and other LGBT people, along with forcefully asserting the subordination of women (not only ripping away the right to abortion and threatening birth control, but even with some fascists openly arguing that women should once again be denied the right to vote).

This fascism has, as a battering ram, the attack on immigrants, on the basis of an “immigration crisis” that is being grossly exaggerated—and even to the degree that it is real, this reality is being crudely distorted. This fascism openly defies and tramples on the rule of law, both within the country and in international relations, with the open declaration that it refuses to recognize, or be restrained by, any national or international law regarding the waging of war, including through the deliberate and wanton targeting of non-combatants. This fascism is continually committing, and escalating, all manner of atrocities, deliberately at a dizzying pace, in order to disorient and demoralize those who would oppose this.

While defeating—removing from power—this fascist regime is an immediate and urgent objective, it is necessary, once again, and critical to understand this: Any hope that relying on and tailing the Democratic Party can bring about a just solution to the crisis, any attempt to make the Democratic Party something other than what it is—a ruling class party—and, more broadly, any attempt to “work within this system” as a means of ending its terrible oppression and ruthless exploitation, its existential threats to humanity through environmental destruction and the danger of nuclear war—any such hope, any such attempt, is fundamentally bankrupt and bound to result in failure, with the resulting continuation, indeed accentuation and acceleration, of all too real horror.

So let me end the first part of this presentation with this very important conclusion:

So long as people, not just in one or another country but in the world as a whole, remain locked within the framework and confines of this system of capitalism-imperialism, there can be no good resolution to the already terrible situation with which humanity is now confronted and the suffering to which the masses of humanity are continually subjected—and humanity will continue to be forced marched into an even worse disaster, into an even more awful abyss, and possibly even to extinction.

The Solution: Wrenching a Radically Emancipating Revolution Out of This Madness

First, what is meant by revolution? The following, from “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating,” speaks to the essence of this: “the institutions of violent suppression of this system must finally be broken apart, defeated and dismantled by an organized revolutionary force. That is what is necessary for things to go beyond just mass protest, however militant and determined, and become a real revolution.” And, quoting from the revcom “Declaration And Call”:

A revolution means a force of millions, drawn from many different parts of society and organized for an all-out fight to overthrow this system and replace it with a radically different and much better economic and political system, a socialist system, based on meeting the needs of the people and carrying forward the fight for a communist world where there will finally be an end, everywhere, to the exploitation, oppression, and destruction of the environment that is built into this system of capitalism-imperialism. Anything less than this revolution will completely fail to deal with the root of all the problems or lead to the actual solution.

In short: In today’s world, to fundamentally change society, you must seize power—overthrow the existing state power and establish a new state power.

In “normal times”—or, to put it another way: with the exception of extraordinary times when the basic functioning, relations and “rules” of the system are seriously disrupted and their “permanence” is seriously brought into question not just among a few people but more broadly throughout society—people are shaped and confined within, “locked into,” the existing dominant system. This is why, as a general phenomenon (but not something to be made into a dogma) it is in times of acute crisis that fundamental change becomes possible.

So, what then are the necessary conditions for revolution? As explained in “This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible”:

A revolution becomes possible, even in a powerful country like this, when three main factors have been brought into being:

A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the “usual way of doing things,” that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the “normal” way that people have been conditioned to accept.

A revolutionary people in the millions and millions, with their “allegiance” to this system broken, and their determination to fight for a more just society greater than their fear of the violent repression of this system.

An organized revolutionary force—made up of continually growing numbers of people, from among the most oppressed but also from many other parts of society—a force which is grounded in, and is working systematically to apply, the most scientific approach to building for and then carrying out revolution, and which is increasingly looked to by masses of people to lead them to bring about the radical change that is urgently needed.

These factors for revolution, as a whole, clearly do not exist right now—but, again, this is one of those rare times when these factors for revolution could be brought into being.

Without being mechanical about this, there is a definite importance to understanding, in a living way, the role of these three conditions—and their ongoing interconnection, or dialectical relation as we would say—in relation to the possibility of revolution. The first condition essentially exists now, and this situation is continually intensifying—particularly through the accelerating juggernaut of the Trump fascist regime.

As for the second and third conditions, these are seriously “lagging” behind the development of the first condition. In regard to the second condition, while there are millions, and tens of millions, who are deeply disturbed and outraged by the escalating outrages of the Trump/fascist regime, there has been, up to now, very little (there is a near complete lack of) hunger and searching for a radical solution outside the framework of the existing system. Closely interconnected particularly with the status of things in regard to the second condition, while revolutionary communist forces based on the new communism do exist, at this point they are far short of what they urgently need to be, quantitatively (very small numbers) and qualitatively (a very uneven grasp of and application of the new communism).

In the context of the deepening, and overall intensifying, situation relating to the first condition, with the dialectic between the atrocities of the regime and resistance against this, initiative must be seized to transform the second and third conditions, through struggle—both struggle against the oppressive system and the intensification of its atrocities under the Trump fascist regime, and fierce ideological struggle to raise people’s sights beyond the narrow confines of this system, to win rapidly growing numbers of people (including among those not presently in motion) to recognize and seize on the necessity and the possibility for a real revolution to sweep away this system as a whole—which, among its overall ongoing atrocities, has given rise to the Trump fascist regime.

As has been previously emphasized in works of mine (and others) what is needed is a repolarization—for revolution—which involves the crucial struggle against the Trump fascist regime but also the recognition that this fascism has arisen out of the particular development of the system of exploitation and oppression in this country, in the context of the larger world, and it is this whole system of capitalism-imperialism that has to go.

Once again, the reality is that this is a rare time when the revolution to abolish and uproot this system, and bring into being a fundamentally different and far better system, is possible. And this rare time must not be squandered—wasted, thrown away—but must be seized on, and acted on, by all those who, at any given time, are hungering and searching for a whole different, really liberating and uplifting, way that people could be living and relating to each other.

While the objective reality—in particular the domination of this system over people, not only in the material form of exploitation and oppression, but also in terms of culture and ideology and how people are conditioned to think—while all this is a major factor in the difficulty we are experiencing in winning people to revolution, with the new communism as its foundation and guideline, the fact is that significant shortcomings among the new communists have been responsible for this as well. Essentially, this is a matter of consistently proceeding, or not, on the basis of the new communism, above all its scientific method and approach, and on that basis carrying out the necessary work, and waging the necessary struggle, to win people, on that solid basic foundation, to the understanding of the profound need, and the real possibility, of an actual revolution—yes, even in this most powerful capitalist-imperialist country—and why there is nothing more meaningful than working to bring about this revolution. To the degree that this has not been consistently done, it is a major reason why the ranks of the new communist revolutionaries are not overcoming the very real obstacles that need to be overcome in order to continue to be strengthened, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, in the way they urgently need to.

To put things in terms that are stark—but scientific—it is not only humanity that is at the brink...it is also the “communist project,” and the further breakthrough with the new communism, which represents the only path to a future worth living in for the masses of humanity and ultimately humanity as a whole.

I will come back to this profound reality—and to the overall question of what is to be done in seriously striving to transform the situation. But, first and as the foundation for this, it is important to go further into how all the horrors with which people are now being confronted have fundamentally arisen out of the very nature and dynamics—driven by the basic contradictions—of the capitalist system, particularly now when this system has become a system based on worldwide exploitation—the system of capitalism-imperialism.

And it is important, in turn, to speak to the basic scientific orientation, method and approach that leads to this critical understanding.

This involves the necessity and importance of taking up and systematically applying the scientific method of dialectical and historical materialism, in opposition to all kinds of unscientific notions and rationalizations that serve to maintain this monstrously outmoded system.

In basic terms, materialism is the recognition that all of reality consists of matter, and nothing else—no supernatural forces or beings, nothing which does not have real, material existence (as one important expression of this, human thought is itself the result of real material processes within human beings, especially their nervous systems and in particular their brains, in interaction with the larger material world). Dialectics refers to the fact that material reality (including human society) is not static but is full of contradiction, is constantly changing, and in certain circumstances can undergo a major, qualitative change (from one form of matter to a qualitatively different form—like the everyday experience where water that is boiled becomes steam; or when a new species emerges in the process of natural evolution; or when a revolution in human society brings into being a qualitatively new system—for example, when socialism results from the overthrow of capitalism). Historical materialism is the application of dialectical materialism to the development of human society (as well as nature generally).

Let’s start with this: mode of production... mode of production... mode of production!

This refers to the economic system—the way in which it functions—the way things are produced, exchanged and distributed. This constitutes the foundation for, and ultimately determines the character of, the society overall: the social relations, political institutions, dominant ways of thinking and culture. The following, from “Breakthroughs,” provides an important explanation of the relation between the economic base of society (the mode of production) and the superstructure (the politics, including laws, as well as ideology and culture) and why the superstructure is, and has to be, in basic accordance with the economic base:

Here we get to another important component of Marxist scientific understanding: the relation between the economic base of society and the political and ideological superstructure (the political structures and institutions, and the dominant culture and ideas). Ultimately—not in the mechanical sense that everything can be immediately reduced to this, but ultimately and fundamentally—the superstructure of society has to correspond to the underlying production relations. The economic base of society, the “mode of production”—how society actually carries out the production and reproduction of the material requirements of life and enables people to reproduce—that sets the terms for what the political institutions and processes will be and what the prevailing ideas and culture will be. And I’ve made the point, for example in Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon, that if the superstructure is in any significant way and over any period of time out of whack with, in conflict in any essential way with, the economic base, society will grind to a halt....There is an interconnection between the two; there is a certain “life of its own” to the ideas and culture of society and to the political institutions and processes, but they are also interwoven closely with, and ultimately determined by, the production and social relations.

Once again, if the superstructure is in any essential way and over any period of time out of whack with the underlying production relations, it will cause society to grind to a halt, and then forces will intervene to try to restore “order” by one means or another, including by the most extreme means.

To illustrate this basic point, I have used the question of “the right to eat”—why such a “right” cannot be an operating principle of the capitalist system: As I spoke to earlier, under this system, if people who cannot afford food and other basic necessities of life were to declare that, no matter what, they had the right to those basic necessities, and proceeded to take those necessities without paying for them, the whole system of capitalism would be thrown into profound crisis and cease to function. This is an expression of the critical point that Marx emphasized: rights are determined by, and cannot be in fundamental conflict with, the basic character and relations of the economic system (the mode of production); and the superstructure of politics, ideology and culture, including the law, will be an expression of this profound reality. Or in Marx’s own words: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” (In “Birds and Crocodiles” as well as “Breakthroughs,” the interview with me in early 2025 and an earlier interview on the RNL [Revolution, Nothing Less] Show in 2022, I get more extensively into the relation between the economic base and the superstructure and why, in any system, the superstructure must be in essential correspondence with the economic base, the mode of production.)

The mode of production of any given society, at any given time, is not static and unchanging, but is constantly undergoing development and change, as the development of the productive forces brings forth changes. (The productive forces refers to land, raw materials, buildings, machinery and other technology used in production—and people with their knowledge and abilities, who bring about changes in the productive forces.) At certain points, the development of the productive forces requires a major, qualitative transformation of the relations of production—which in turn requires a revolution in the superstructure, to abolish the political system, in particular the state power, that is enforcing the old economic system (or mode of production).

All this is true of all modes of production, including the capitalist mode of production, which is what needs to be focused on here.

(In the interview in early 2025 I discussed what capitalism is—and is not—the basic relations and dynamics of capitalism as a system and how this finds expression on a global scale now that capitalism has long since developed into the system of capitalism-imperialism. Here, I am going to touch on some key aspects of this.)

There is a basic and crucial contradiction inherent in (built into) capitalism as a system of commodity production and exchange. As explained in my article Commodities & Capitalism—And The Terrible Consequences Of This System, A Basic Explanation, a commodity is something that is produced in order to be exchanged, not something consumed by the person who produces it (for example, if food is grown to be sold on the market, that food is a commodity; but if it is grown to be consumed by the person who grows it, it is not a commodity). With the capitalist system, things are produced and exchanged overwhelmingly as commodities.

Another distinguishing feature of capitalism is that labor power (the ability to work in general) is a commodity. (This is what happens when people apply for a job: they are seeking to sell their unique commodity, their labor power—their ability to work—in exchange for a wage, or salary.) This means not just a particular kind of work in a particular situation, but the ability to work in general. That’s an important understanding and distinction.

This is different from slavery and other forms of exploitation. Under slavery the distinguishing and defining feature is that the exploited class is owned by the exploiting class—literally chattel slavery. Under feudalism, for example, the exploited class—in particular the serfs, the peasants on small parcels of land—are fixed to that land in relations from which they cannot easily or readily escape.

On the other hand, the exploited class under capitalism, the proletariat, is a much more mobile class, because of the nature of capitalism. Under capitalism it is not profitable for the exploiting class, the capitalists, to actually own those it exploits, because that requires a big investment in purchasing those that one owns, and then you have to make that back. Under the capitalist system it’s much more dynamic than that, and you’re likely to be driven out of business by some other force if you actually tried to purchase and own as slaves the people that you exploit. So this is an important distinction. Given the nature and dynamics of capitalism, it is in the capitalist’s interests to pay the workers wages over the course of the time that they are working for the capitalist—and creating wealth for the capitalist: This leaves the capitalist free to lay off workers, if it is in the capitalist’s interests to do so, without having laid out a considerable sum to actually purchase the workers, as actual slaves, before they have created wealth for the capitalist. This is an important difference between outright slavery and capitalist exploitation—which, again, has to do with the basic nature and dynamics of capitalism, in contrast with slavery.

The exploited class under capitalism, the proletariat, as I’ve said before, has to be free in two senses. It has to be free of any ownership of the means of production, so it has no other choice but to work for someone who does. It can’t own a factory, it can’t own a small business, it has to have no other means to live other than being exploited by a capitalist. That’s a “freedom” of the proletariat under capitalism: freedom from any ownership of means of production. Otherwise, you could never force people to work under the conditions of capitalist exploitation. The other freedom is this: it has to be free to be mobile, to move, to go from one place to another, even traveling far away from where it was at one point. And it has to be mobile so that it can be laid off and then re-employed/re-exploited (and vulnerable, in its unemployed condition, to being even more bitterly exploited, as the condition for being employed again by some capitalist).

All these are things that set capitalism, and the form of exploitation under capitalism, apart from other systems of exploitation.

What is in common is that wealth of the exploiting class is created and accumulated on the basis of the exploitation of the class subordinate to it. That’s what is common to all systems of exploitation.

But what is particular about capitalism is important to understand, because it has to do with the dynamism of capitalism: how it is compelled to rapidly transform the very conditions of production, and to seek new arenas of exploitation within the country—for example, moving factories from the North to the South—or even internationally. This is how capitalism has become a global phenomenon, having spread its tentacles throughout the world—encompassing, and enchaining, masses of humanity and ultimately all of humanity.

Then there is the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—which is different, again, from all other exploiting systems—this contradiction between socialized production and private accumulation. Under capitalism you will see factories with literally thousands of people under one roof, with a division of labor—people carrying out different particular tasks, for example, on an assembly line—and overall you have millions and ultimately billions of people involved in the production and transportation of things produced, including through the supply chains of international capitalism, and so on, and so forth. That is different, again, than in the other systems of exploitation; even while there were groups of people working together under slavery, or whatever, that is different than the massive socialization of production under capitalism, which is a defining feature of capitalism. But, the accumulation of what is produced and the wealth thereby is not social—it is private, in the hands of different and competing capitalists. And that “different and competing” is important because it results in, or contributes to, the anarchy of capitalism, where things are constantly being disrupted and businesses are taking over other businesses. We see these giant mergers now taking place in the media, and so on, and so forth. This is a very dynamic system in that way. And its dynamism has, as Marx pointed out, actually created the material basis for a different, radically different and much better system, where the contradiction between socialized production and private accumulation is resolved by society as a whole, through its government, socially appropriating the means of production and wealth that is produced, and then using this in the interests of the masses of people to meet their fundamental needs, not only materially but culturally, intellectually and so on. (The means of production under capitalism are themselves the result of social production.)

This basic contradiction of capitalism—between socialized production and private accumulation (or private appropriation)—leads, or contributes to, the anarchy of capitalism because of the fact that the private accumulation is not one capitalist class accumulating together but distinct and competing capitalists accumulating in rivalry with each other. And ultimately this takes shape on an international scale, including in the form of different capitalist countries in rivalry and contention with each other, even to the point of warfare, which has already resulted twice in two devastating world wars.

To go back to commodities: At the core of all this, all the essential contradictions of capitalism, is the contradiction inherent in commodities, built into commodities. Marx, for a very important reason, started his major work, Capital, examining the development of commodities. Because the contradiction of commodities is ultimately at the core of the contradictions of capitalism. What do I mean by that? In order for a commodity to bring remuneration, to bring back something in exchange, there are two qualities it has to have. It has to have use value: in other words, it has to be useful to some person or group of people, or large numbers of people (that can be in terms of something they prefer, it doesn’t have to be use in the narrowest sense materially, meeting a material need). But it has to be useful to people. It has to have use value. And it has to have realized exchange value: it has to actually be sold or exchanged on the market in order for the exchange value to be realized. (The exchange value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into its production.)

In other words, to put it simply, you create things and they have to be sold—or you’re in big trouble. The reason you’re in big trouble is because you don’t start at zero when you put commodities on the market. A lot of expenditure went into creating the commodity in the first place. Getting the raw materials, working on them, paying people, paying for the facility in which this takes place, and so on, and so forth. So already this commodity, when it goes on the market, has a lot of value in it (value that, again, is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor, at each stage, that went into its production) but that value also involves expenditure that you, as a commodity producer, have laid out (and if you’re a capitalist you’re exploiting other people to get this commodity produced, or these commodities produced). So it goes into the market, but the problem is that you’ve already laid out the expenditure for this, but nobody can know—because of all the competing capitalists, nobody can know how much of your product, or if your product at all, is actually going to be consumed, if it’s actually going to realize its potential exchange value.

So this contributes to the anarchy of capitalism, because all these different capitalists are putting products into the market in competition with each other, but all kinds of things can influence whether their particular product, or even the products generally, actually find something in exchange, namely money, in some form or another as the most common form of exchange. So again, beginning with this basic cell of capitalist society, which generalizes commodity production, this basic cell of the commodity, you see all the contradictions that unfold in capitalism around the need to actually rely on the use value in order to realize exchange value—in other words, in order to get back what you put into it, and hopefully get more so that you can expand and compete.

Now, this is the kind of thing that’s hidden, obviously, in everyday life and from most people. They have no understanding. The common understanding—and social-democrats and progressive people, and all these people that say, “I don’t like capitalism, I hate capitalism, I’m against capitalism,” they think it’s just greed. But there are internal dynamics of capitalism that lead to anarchy, lead to the bitter competition and lead to conflict, not only between the exploiters and exploited but also among and between exploiters themselves, including on the level of capitalist states contending and warring.

Yet it is all rooted ultimately in this contradiction inherent, built into, commodities which are generalized under capitalism. Very rarely, it’s a very small part of the picture, that people produce and utilize (consume) the things that they themselves produce without putting them on the market and getting something in exchange. But in a highly developed capitalist system, all this is obviously not readily apparent to people. You know, you take your phone, you put it up there to pay, and you don’t realize that underneath all that is a whole bunch of labor going on and a whole bunch of exchange of commodities, including the commodity labor power.

So there are tremendous consequences of this system which have now become extremely expressed under this system of imperialism, especially as it’s running up against its limits, this capitalist-imperialist system. Not only consequences for those who are bitterly exploited, like the children in the Congo, or the women in Bangladesh, and people in Egypt and all around the world, in Latin America, but also the consequences for the environment, the danger of nuclear war—the consequences for society in general in terms of how it’s perverted to conform to the dynamics of capitalism.

For those who are exploited under this system, the only fundamental means of coming out from under and doing away with their exploited condition is to abolish the system as a whole. If you do not do that, then you are constantly going to be forced back into the terms of the system. That’s why I use the term people are being “forced marched.” They are being conditioned, compelled, confined and forced marched in a certain way by the dynamics of the system. And as long as you’re within the enslaving confines of that system, as individuals you have no real alternative and no real options, or they’re very limited. Maybe particular individuals can change their position but, as Marx pointed out, for the masses of people they cannot change their conditions except by abolishing the oppressive system.

I have put so much emphasis on mode of production... mode of production... mode of production, because it is fundamental. But it would be dogmatic and wrong to approach this in a mechanical way, as if the mode of production and the relations encompassed in it were the only important relations in society. With regard to “4 Alls” that Marx spoke of, he includes the social relations that correspond to the production relations on which class exploitation is based, or class relations are based. And this is one of the things that people say by way of supposed critique of Marxism: “Well, Marxism only deals with class, it doesn’t deal with race, it doesn’t deal with women...” No! As represented by those “4 Alls,” it deals with everything. It recognizes that the mode of production is fundamental, but also that there’s a whole complex of relations that are interconnected with and ultimately grounded in the mode of production as the foundation, but also have a life of their own, to put it that way, and a culture which is developed in relation to them. It’s not just that the prevailing ruling culture only reflects the mode of production, in a linear sense; it also reflects all the different social relations—racial oppression, the oppression of women, gender oppression generally, and so on. And it reflects the approach to the environment. All that gets reflected in the culture, in the superstructure, in the ideology and politics of the society that is ultimately, essentially and fundamentally, grounded in the mode of production, but is not reducible to that. It’s very important not to be reductionist about this.

So we have two important points here. Mode of production...mode of production...mode of production—that’s fundamental. At the same time, there’s a whole complex of social relations bound up with this, which should not and cannot be ignored if you’re trying to bring about any kind of positive change.

(Again, these relations are discussed more fully in “Breakthroughs” as well as Birds Cannot Give Birth To Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon, which can be found in my Collected Works.)

Returning to the question of revolution to transform society—and this applies especially to the communist revolution as the most fundamental transformation, an historic transformation—this takes place, and must take place, can only take place, in the superstructure. You don’t make a revolution in the mode of production. You can’t fundamentally change the mode of production without changing the system overall—and in particular the system of rule, the state power, that maintains and enforces the mode of production (and the corresponding social relations). You make a revolution in the superstructure, which enforces that mode of production, so that you can break that enforcement, and then go to work on the mode of production and the social relations. You have to overthrow the old, capitalist state power, the actual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which enforces exploitation and oppression, and you have to bring about the establishment, in its place, of socialist state power (the dictatorship of the proletariat)—aiming for the abolition of exploitation and oppression, not just in a particular socialist country itself, but ultimately and fundamentally in the world as a whole. With the achievement of communism, throughout the world, will finally come an end to any need or basis for dictatorship of any kind, and in place of that a world community of human beings, based on principles of cooperation and collective decision-making, and giving increasing scope to the flourishing of human beings on that foundation and in that framework.

The most decisive objective and fundamental necessity of this socialist revolution and new socialist state power is the radical transformation of the economy (the mode of production), to uproot the basis for any exploitation, for any situation in which one part of society is accumulating wealth, and power, through controlling, dominating, and profiting from the labor of others. This transformation of the economy is the basis on which the transformation of social relations (racial, sex and gender, and other social relations) can and must be transformed, along with the prevailing culture and morality, to eliminate oppressive divisions. I have spoken, once again, to how this has to be approached dialectically, not mechanically or in a reductionist way.

The transformation of the mode of production is also the foundation—not the entirety, but the foundation—for carrying out the internationalist orientation and responsibility to support the advance of communist revolution throughout the world, based on the scientific understanding that ultimately the thorough elimination and uprooting of exploitative and oppressive relations can only happen with the achievement of communism, which in turn can only be achieved on a worldwide basis. (While delving further into key aspects of internationalism and the advance to communism, worldwide, is beyond what I can get into here, in a number of works available at revcom.us—for example, “Breakthroughs,” “Birds and Crocodiles,” and “Putting An End to Exploitation, and All Oppression,” including the footnotes to that article, which are themselves important—there is some important discussion of this. There is also very important discussion of this in the polemic “Communism or Nationalism?” by the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico, which appears in the online theoretical journal Demarcations, Issue No. 4.)

At the same time, as I have been emphasizing, there is not a “static” and “one-way” relation between the economic base of society (the mode of production) and the superstructure of politics, ideology and culture, as well as the social relations. There is a dialectical relation—a back-and-forth relation, in which the economic base is the foundation, which overall sets the terms of things, but other social relations, and the superstructure, impact and influence the character and direction of the economic base. If there is the intention to develop the mode of production based on relations that do not involve exploitation, but the social relations are oppressive, and the politics, ideology and culture promote oppression and exploitation, the development of a non-exploitative mode of production will be seriously undermined, and ultimately reversed.

The following (from the book The New Communism, also quoted in “Breakthroughs”) summarizes the essential dynamics involved in the relation between the mode of production and the transformation of social relations to abolish oppression:

Ultimately, the mode of production sets the foundation and the limits of change, in terms of how you address any social problem, such as the oppression of women, or the oppression of Black people or Latinos, or the contradiction between mental work and manual work, or the situation with the environment, or the situation of immigrants, and so on. While all those things have reality and dynamics in their own right, and aren’t reducible to the economic system, they all take place within the framework and within the fundamental dynamics of that economic system; and that economic system, that mode of production, sets the foundation and the ultimate limits of change in regard to all those social questions. So, if you want to get rid of all these different forms of oppression, you have to address them in their own right, but you also have to fundamentally change the economic system to give you the ability to be able to carry through those changes in fundamental terms. To put it another way: You have to have an economic system that doesn’t prevent you from making those changes, and instead not only allows but provides a favorable foundation for making those changes.

All this, once again, can only be achieved on the basis of a revolution, in the superstructure, to establish socialist state power (the dictatorship of the proletariat) in place of the capitalist state power (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).

From the fundamental point of view of moving beyond the horrors of capitalism-imperialism—and, in more immediate terms, in order to open the way to the possibility of any decent relations within this country and in the world overall—it is crucial to defeat and remove the fascist Trump regime, on the basis of massive, nonviolent but sustained and determined mobilization, involving people with many diverse political perspectives, as has been called for and actively worked for by Refuse Fascism.

With regard to this fight against Trump/MAGA fascism and the fight for the future, the following are possibilities:

** First, fascist consolidation with all that means: the Trump regime remains in power and brutally enforces its reign of terror and atrocity, within the country and in the larger world. Things are already very far along in this direction—and this further emphasizes the critical importance of massive mobilization against this regime with the aim of actually removing it from power.

** Second, through a combination of massive nonviolent but determined struggle from below interpenetrating with very real, sharp and deepening contradictions at the top, the regime is driven from power.

** Third, the swirl of events leads to a situation where revolution, to abolish the whole system, becomes immediately and sharply posed as the necessity, even in order to remove the Trump fascist regime from power. Or, the regime is removed from power, short of revolution. In that case, the ouster of the regime would likely lead to at least a temporary cooling off of the struggle from below, giving rise to illusions, and new challenges—but a fundamental revolutionary resolution still could be possible (although certainly not guaranteed, especially in more immediate terms). At the same time, an actual civil war is a real possibility in that situation, if fascist forces, among the ruling class as well as in society more broadly, refuse to accept the defeat and removal of the Trump regime and turn to civil war to re-establish fascist rule.

It is in light of this, and the overall consequences of allowing this fascist regime to remain in power, what I emphasized in my social media message #111 is crucially important: “We revcoms are serious—and all decent people need to be serious—about actually defeating this Trump/MAGA fascism.” And:

One of the most fundamental principles of the new communism I have developed is the need to consistently approach things in a serious, scientific way—and this means being open and honest about what our objectives are. As I said at the beginning, we revcoms (revolutionary communists, based on the new communism) are serious about defeating this fascism—because this fascism represents a very real horror not only for the people in this country but for people throughout the world.

At the same time, as I have repeatedly emphasized, this fascism has been brought forth by—has grown out of the very soil of—the system of capitalism-imperialism and its development through the history of this country. By its very nature, this system has continually brought forth horror after horror; and only an actual revolution can open the way to finally ending the terrible atrocity and needless suffering constantly caused by this system.

We revcoms will continue to work urgently to win people, in the thousands and then millions, to see the need—and to act on the need—for revolution. If it turned out that a massive movement actually succeeded in defeating Trump/MAGA fascism, without that involving the revolutionary overthrow of the whole system of capitalism-imperialism, then we would certainly not somehow be “disappointed”! We would recognize the great importance of this victory, for the cause of humanity. And we would continue to work tirelessly to carry forward the struggle toward the goal of revolution which is necessary to end the endless horrors of this whole system of capitalism-imperialism, and bring into being a much better system—as set forth in the Declaration at revcom.us: WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM.

The present situation is one where the efforts to drive out the Trump regime, as focused in Refuse Fascism’s Call and mobilization to D.C. last November, have not succeeded, at least in immediate terms. In light of this, while resistance against the regime’s overall onslaught (and different particular egregious outrages, such as the ICE raids) must and will continue, the attention of decent people will increasingly be drawn (spontaneously and through the action of the Democratic Party and those aligned with it) toward the 2026 mid-term elections (and even beyond that toward 2028). In relation to this, there are also different significant possibilities:

* Through a combination of factors, a profound and acute crisis for the regime could arise which would prominently, and more or less immediately, put its removal, through one means or another, “on the agenda.” In this connection, there is once again the real question of whether, in the event of a serious move to remove Trump, this could lead to a civil war in some form, with the Trump/MAGA fascists, including figures within the ruling structures, refusing to accept this and moving to armed rebellion.

* The Trump regime could move to prevent (or “delay”) the mid-term elections.

* The regime could move in (other) ways to maintain Republican control of both houses of Congress: “rigging” the elections and/or refusing to accept results that allow the Democrats to win a majority in one or both houses of Congress.

* Somehow, as a result of those elections, the Democrats become a majority in at least one house of Congress while the Trump regime remains in power otherwise, very likely with the continued backing of the fascist-dominated Supreme Court.

In relation to all these (and other possible) scenarios, it will be crucial to maintain active resistance and a basic “organizational structure” to give orientation and effect to the overall fight against the Trump fascist regime.

In any case, what is said in my social media message #141 will be continually borne out:

“Every day this is driven home more and more forcefully and cruelly: There is no living with this Trump/MAGA fascism.”

It is not possible, at this point, to determine which of these scenarios—or perhaps some other situation—might develop. But this orientation is crucial: While the resistance against the fascist regime must continue, the advocates of the new communism, while continuing to be actively involved in this resistance, must be firmly oriented and prepared to carry out ongoing work for revolution—theoretical, political, practical and organizational work—even as this will need to be done under the conditions that will likely be qualitatively more repressive and difficult.

A very important question in relation to this is: what are the forces for revolution?

One definite and potentially very important factor is that among those actively opposing the Trump fascist regime, there is a fairly widespread questioning of “what should come next,” after this regime is no longer in power—and a fairly widespread sentiment that “just going back to what was before” is not the answer—even if, at this point, this thinking and questioning still remains within the framework of the existing system. So, while uniting broadly to defeat and remove the Trump fascist regime, it is vitally important to deeply engage, and carry out principled discussion and struggle over, the question: what has given rise to this fascism and what is the fundamental solution to all this?

Key forces and critical problems.

Black people.

My January 2021 New Year’s Statement speaks to this major development:

Since the end of World War 2 (75 years ago), the situation of Black people has dramatically changed....Over the past several decades, due to heightened globalization and automation of production, interacting with continuing discrimination, there has been the elimination of a great deal of factory employment which provided Black men (and some women) with better-paying jobs in the urban areas. At the same time, as a result of the civil rights and Black liberation struggles of the 1960s/early ’70s, and other factors, there has been the growth of the Black middle class. But there has also been an increase of the so-called “underclass,” concentrated and contained in urban ghettos and more or less permanently locked out of regular employment in the “formal” economy.

Unable to provide a positive resolution to acute contradictions bound up with these changes—unable to end systemic racism which involves degrading discrimination against even economically better-off sections of Black people—unable to integrate large numbers of Black people into the “formal” economy—the ruling forces in society have responded to this situation with mass incarceration of millions of Black males (and growing numbers of females) with arrests, trials, convictions and sentences embodying yet more discrimination and injustice, and by unleashing and backing systematic police terror, which is especially directed against Black people in the inner cities but can target any Black person, anywhere, at any time. The attempt to brutally enforce “law and order,” given that a more just solution is impossible under this system, heightens the volatility of this whole situation, leading to further upheaval—including completely justified and righteous protest and rebellion—which, in turn, is seized on by fascist forces in promoting their grotesque white supremacist portrayal of the masses of Black people as “criminals” and “uncaged animals.”

The Trumpite fascists seize on the existence of crime, gang conflicts and violence in the inner cities as part of their overall aggressive assertion of white supremacy and vicious repression, not only in justifying the ongoing rampant murder by police, especially of Black people and Latinos, as well as Native Americans, but also now the mobilization of National Guard and other military forces against the people in urban areas with large populations of Black people, and Latinos. The truth is that, as I stated in my social media message #130: “This is not about ‘fighting crime’ but is about enforcing police state fascist rule and carrying out the racist terror that is at the heart of Trump/MAGA fascism.”

These fascists—and, for that matter, all sections and representatives of the ruling class—fail, or refuse, to recognize and acknowledge that the conditions that are the fundamental source of crime and violence are rooted in the basic relations, and the dominant ideology and culture, fostered and enforced by this monstrously criminal system of capitalism-imperialism.

(Two important articles of mine, “Racial Oppression Can Be Ended—But Not Under This System,” and “Police and Prisons: Reformist Illusions And The Revolutionary Solution,” go into these questions in some depth—showing how all this is fundamentally rooted in this system, and why this cannot be fundamentally transformed through reforms within this system, but can be through an actual revolution to sweep away and uproot this system and the relations and conditions it forcibly imposes on masses of oppressed people and on society overall.)

On the one hand, the major changes in the situation of Black people, since the end of World War 2, involved an end to legal segregation and the open subjugation of Black people in the status of (at best) “second-class citizens,” while at the same time these changes have created new difficulties for Black people overall and the struggle for their complete emancipation from centuries of racist oppression and terror. The growth of the Black petite bourgeoisie (middle class) has led to the increase of Black intellectuals, more than a few of whom have done important scholarly work to expose not only the history but the present reality of the terrible oppression to which Black people continue to be subjected. At the same time, there is the phenomenon that is discussed in “Hope For Humanity,” referring to Marx’s important insight that every class viewpoint identifies the particular interest of the class it represents with the general interests of society. In “Hope For Humanity” I specifically spoke to how this applies to Black people:

Black people as a whole suffer horrific oppression in many forms, including one of the most egregious expressions of this, murder by police, as well as rampant discrimination and racism throughout the society; but different classes, strata and sections of the Black population experience this differently and respond to it differently. You can see it in people like Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The basic outlook they hold, and propagate, is essentially this: The way to deal with all this is to get big bank—get that paper, that’ll deal with all this. Well, this is obviously the outlook and the aspiration of bourgeois strata, what have become bourgeois strata among Black people. And then there are other manifestations of the same kind of outlook among the more bourgeois and petit bourgeois strata of Black people who see the solution as working within the system and getting a better place within this system. That is their spontaneous inclination, their spontaneous view of the problem and the solution. And, among other things, this explains why there has been such enthusiasm for having Obama as the first Black president.

Along with this, among the Black middle class, and with significant influence among Black people generally, there is the phenomenon of “identity politics,” which involves an incorrect understanding of the fundamental cause of, and the actual solution to, the oppression of Black people.

Among the masses of Black people who are not part of the Black middle (or upper) class, and especially the youth, there is definitely the influence of what is promoted by Jay-Z and Beyoncé (and the general idea of “making it” within this system—or in any case making it “out” of the terrible conditions to which especially more impoverished Black people are subjected—no matter what it takes). And the changes among Black people over the last number of decades—including the growth of the Black middle class, the elimination of more stable factory employment for large numbers of Black men especially, and the break up and break down of what were more cohesive Black communities that had existed even under terrible conditions of brutal oppression—all this has, in the short run, undermined the basis for the kind of powerful Black liberation movement that arose in the 1960s. (In the movie Bulworth, the character portrayed by Halle Berry gives voice to some of this, even if not in a fully developed, scientific way.)

Along with all this, there have been the accompanying putrid ideological and cultural influences constantly promoted in the “entertainment” media and by the system overall. In “Breakthroughs,” part 2, there is a further discussion of this. One of the phenomena it points to is “Reaganism” among the masses of Black people (and others): the notion of getting rich by any means necessary (to invoke a perversion of Malcolm X’s defiant stand against oppression).

(This “Reaganism,” of course, has not been limited to Black people, nor to the recent period in American history. In the first part of the 19th century, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book American Democracy, noted that, among other distinguishing traits of the people in this country was a particularly pronounced acquisitiveness, a restless quest to acquire wealth. While this has been a feature of “the American character,” from the beginning, it has reached new heights—or depths—with the heightened parasitism of this capitalist-imperialist country, particularly since the 1970s.)

Along with this “Reaganism,” certain hustlers, “influencers” and others promoting themselves and their narrow interests, often do so in the name of Black people, even as this “influence” and promotion is actually in conflict with, and working against, ending the continuing oppression of Black people overall.

In “Fight the Power,” Chuck D proclaims: “most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.” And the reality is that those searching for a real way out of the madness, will not find “heroes” in the dominant rotten “culture” that is relentlessly promoted, in all kinds of ways, by this system.

Desperate Conditions, Demoralization, a Logic of Defeat—Yet, Despite Everything...

Here is some important understanding of major changes over the past period, since the 1960s, the continuing potential for revolution, and the crucial importance of a scientific approach to all this:

We have seen the possibility of a world without oppression powerfully expressed in the not-too-distant past, during the radical upsurge that took place within this country and throughout the world during the 1960s and early 1970s. Within this country, the struggle of Black people was at the forefront of all this, and as that struggle became more radical in opposition to the system itself, and groups like the Black Panther Party, driven by the impatience and daring of Black youth, grew and gained influence, the advanced role of the struggle for Black liberation exerted an even more powerful positive role. And, as a very significant part of the widely and strongly held conviction that it was not only necessary but possible to put an end to the nightmare that had been endured for so long:

[A]mong Black people—who we’re always told are just sort of inherently religious—there was a massive turning away from religion, especially among the youth. Why? Because people were filled with hope, they didn’t believe that there was no hope for a better world. They were full of hope for a better world right in this world. And so, among Black people, there was, on the part of the youth in particular, a major turning away from religion and from all the old conventions that went along with religion that were conservatizing influences holding down the people....**

But the great promise of the 1960s radical upsurge, and the hopes that it raised, were not realized—fundamentally because things did not go all the way to an actual revolution. And, over the decades since then, through conscious policy by the ruling powers to foster the growth of more bourgeois and petit bourgeois strata among Black people, while at the same time maintaining and containing the masses of Black people in conditions of deprivation, oppression and vicious repression, this bitter reality has resulted:

Among the basic masses of people, including Black people.... there was a tremendous amount of demoralization and sense of defeat, and the introduction (including through deliberate ruling class policy and action) of massive amounts of drugs further intensified the desperate conditions of the basic masses and further reinforced the sense of demoralization. A lot of people were dying or being reduced to broken wretches on the basis of turning to drugs out of despair—the lack of hope, or the death, in immediate terms, of the hope that inspired so many people, on a real basis, through the course of the 1960s upsurge, which had now ebbed and been transformed. And this situation was made even more desperate and demoralizing with the growth of gangs in the ghettos and barrios of this country (as well as internationally), with youth drawn to the gangs in conditions of increasing deprivation and desperation and what was for most the illusion of getting rich, with the orientation of “get rich or die trying,” fueled by the growth of the drug trade and the influence of the putrid culture promoted throughout society that fostered and extolled the exploitation and degradation of others as the means for making it big, whether on Wall Street and on the world stage, or on the streets in the neighborhoods of the inner city.**

In the face of all this, amidst a feeling of fatalistic hopelessness, there has been, on the part of large numbers of Black people, a retreat into religion. It is often claimed that religion is what has allowed Black people to endure and persevere through all the trials and tribulations—the very real horrors—they have been subjected to throughout their experience in America, and that this remains the case now. But this is a logic of defeat—it rests on the underlying assumption (spoken or unspoken) that the system will basically remain as it has been, and that Black people will continue to be despised and discriminated against, persecuted, brutalized and terrorized, and the best they can hope for is to somehow survive, and strive to thrive, through all this—or, if you suffer in this life but you “get right with the Lord,” or submit to Allah, you will be rewarded in some “next life.”

Once more, the question is sharply posed: How can Black people be finally and fully emancipated from centuries of oppression, and how does this relate to ending all oppression, of all people, everywhere?

The answer is that the possibility of this is real, but it can happen only on the basis of a scientific approach to changing the world and the scientifically-grounded understanding that this oppression is rooted in and caused by the system of capitalism-imperialism—the same system that is viciously exploiting and murderously oppressing people not just in this country but all over the world and is plundering the natural environment—and that this system must and can be overthrown through an actual revolution and replaced by a radically different and far better system: socialism, whose final goal is a communist world, without any oppression or exploitation of anyone, anywhere....

Religion may seem to give people comfort in the face of the oppression and anguish they are forced to endure, or to make people feel that with religion they can keep from “doing wrong”—or, even though they may “do wrong,” they still have some worth. And it is true that, for some people, their religious views are a motivation to fight against various forms of oppression, and many people who approach things from a religious standpoint have insights and knowledge that it is important to know about and learn from. But it is also true that, as a way of thinking and a guide to acting, religion relies on the invention of supernatural beings that do not exist but which are said to ultimately shape and control reality, including the fate of human beings. Religion calls on people to submit to those imaginary supernatural beings (or, to very human authorities speaking in the name of those imaginary supernatural beings) and to follow scriptures that in reality do not lead to ending oppression but actually promote and reinforce all kinds of degradation and horror. (This is something I have illustrated very concretely in the book Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, particularly with regard to the three main monotheistic [one-god] religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.) In this way religion stands in direct opposition to taking up a consistently scientific approach to understanding reality and waging a scientifically-grounded fight to end all oppression....

It is neither possible nor principled—and no one should ever try—to force people to give up beliefs they hold at any given time. In the most fundamental terms, emancipation—from every form of slavery and oppression—must be the voluntary and conscious act of people. But there is a great need and importance to waging ideological struggle, in a principled way but as sharply as necessary, to win people to take up a scientific approach to understanding, and changing, the world and break with ways of thinking that actually contribute to keeping them, and others, oppressed.

Again, it is true that many religious people take part now in important struggles against oppression; and it is also true that many religious people will be among the millions taking part in the revolution to do away with this whole oppressive system. But this revolution, and the continuing struggle to end all oppression and bring about real and complete emancipation, must be led by those, among the most oppressed, and others as well, who have taken up a scientific approach to changing the world and have cast off the mental slavery of religion, along with every other way of thinking that promotes, or at least rationalizes and objectively justifies, oppression.

(This is from my article Bob Avakian “On Emancipation From Mental Slavery And All Oppression.” The parts indicated by ** are quotes from Hope For Humanity On A Scientific Basis, Breaking with Individualism, Parasitism and American Chauvinism. There is also important analysis relating to this in social media messages #91-94 @BobAvakianOfficial, on the critical question of “A Profound Fight for the Soul of Black People: A Defeated People—Or, A Revolutionary People?”)

Despite everything this system has subjected Black people to, and all the ways it has worked to degrade them, there remains, deep in the souls of Black people, a “deeply, deeply felt desire to be rid of these long centuries of oppression.”

Given the overtly racist nature of the Trump regime—and the fact that the revival of the most crude, grotesque, and vicious racism is at the heart of this regime’s fascist onslaught—“Black People Should Be Among the Front Ranks in the Fight to Defeat Trump/MAGA Fascism,” as I put it in my social media message #116. It is a definite fact, borne out every day, that:

The Trump MAGA fascists would have been on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War, fighting to maintain, and expand, slavery....

After the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War, these Trump/MAGA fascists would have been with the Ku Klux Klan, with its repeated lynchings and other terror to reinforce open segregation and brutal discrimination. [This is from my social media message #113.]

Even more fundamentally, Black people have a crucial role to play in bringing about a thoroughgoing, truly emancipating revolution. And it is a profound truth that:

There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.

And let me repeat an important part of this:

Putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity.

Another important aspect of the situation today is that, in fundamental terms, the same big changes that have been brought about by the operation of the capitalist-imperialist system have created the soil for the growth of religious fundamentalism, as well as gangs, especially in the Third World, but also among the oppressed masses in imperialist countries like the U.S. Both gangs, cartels, and so on, as well as religious fundamentalism among the masses of people, arise out of the upheavals and dislocations, as well as deprivations, created by this system, on a world scale as well as within particular countries. And the only alternative to all this, which is actually in the interests of the masses of people caught up in this situation, is revolution to overthrow this system and uproot the conditions it is imposing on those masses, and ultimately on humanity as a whole.

Immigrants.

As is cruelly enacted every day, immigrants, especially those from what Trump considers “shit-hole countries” in the Third World, are targeted by ICE, and other repressive forces of the Trump regime. This includes not only undocumented people but those with legal status, and even citizens (with Trump braying about eliminating the citizenship of many).

To repeat the opening line of my social media message #124: “Donald Trump’s whole fascist regime is caught in a contradiction of its own making: his continual Big Lies”:

From the day he returned to power, in January of this year (2025), Trump has repeatedly violated the Constitution and due process of law, viciously trampling on what are supposed to be basic rights of the people, whether undocumented immigrant, legal resident, or citizen.

A concentration of this has been the Trump regime’s rounding up of immigrants, and moves to quickly deport them—including to a torture-chamber prison in El Salvador—without a hearing or even the chance to speak to a lawyer....

A leading edge of Trump’s campaign [in 2024] was a repeat of his racist lies in his first (2016) campaign for president—slandering millions of immigrants as criminals, rapists, murderers—when the vast majority of immigrants, undocumented as well as documented, are just ordinary people who are seeking a better life for themselves and their families, and who make important contributions to society.

So, since the reality is that there are not hordes of monstrous immigrant criminals, in order to carry out his perverted campaign “promise” to persecute and mass deport immigrants, Trump’s thugs are targeting immigrants, including children, just going about their daily lives—where they work, at school, or a store, or a church, in their homes—or when they are showing up at their regularly scheduled immigration status hearings!

All this has called forth sustained, massive protest and resistance. This has involved immigrants from Latin America, as well as other parts of the world, including those who themselves are citizens but have relatives and friends whose status is less secure; and this has drawn forward people from other parts of society as well.

All this demonstrates the potential of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, as a powerful force, not only in the immediate fight against the Trump fascist regime but, beyond that, in the revolution against this system of capitalism-imperialism, which is fundamentally responsible for the conditions that have driven masses of people to migrate, often over large distances and in the face of great danger—a system which continues to exploit, discriminate against and persecute them in the countries into which they have emigrated.

Students and “educated youth.”

The struggle against oppression and injustice requires the active involvement of youth, including “educated youth” in colleges and universities. To paraphrase a statement by V.I. Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution in 1917: while people of different ages need to be actively involved, it is an essential truth that revolutions are made by people under 30. People under 30 often have more freedom, they’re not so plugged in and locked into the system as older people, and they also have physical conditions and other attributes that enable them to play the most important role in an actual revolution.

At the height (so far) of the opposition to Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, and U.S. backing for that genocide, there were significant protests involving college students around the country, in which foreign students, particularly from the Middle East, were a driving force but many other students also took part—protests which were met with vicious repression, which has continued, and been intensified, with the return to power of the Trump fascist regime.

But now, in the massive demonstrations that have taken place against the Trump fascist regime, college students and other youth have been largely missing. What explains this—and the general phenomenon that youth, and in particular college students, have not, in recent times, been a prominent and driving force in positive political protest and rebellion against the injustices of this system, let alone a force for revolution, as they have been in the past, in this country and more generally?

There are significant material factors involved. As opposed to earlier generations, recent generations of college students have faced significant financial difficulty, being saddled with very heavy debt which takes a long time to pay off, and which funnels and channels them toward jobs, and even toward education which prepares them for jobs, which enable them to more readily pay off the debts. So that’s one material factor.

But there are also cultural and ideological factors: the individualism I’ve spoken about, the relativism and identity politics, the influence of dumbing down social media. And the question does arise: how educated, after all, are these “educated youth” today? This is a real question.

At the same time, there is defeatism and depression among youth, including college students. The instances of depression as well as anxiety among this section of society are at an all time high, from all indications.

But again, there’s the “Reaganism,” the imperialist parasitism and American supremacism that influences all sections of society, not excluding the youth. This American supremacism is often not included, by “progressive” people, among the very harmful “supremacies,” such as white supremacy and male supremacy, but it is a very real and powerfully influencing factor.

Then there is the question of “masculinity,” which has been promoted in the most grotesque ways over several decades now, including through these “podcast bros” and their audiences. The misogyny among male youth, including college students, is a marked factor of the political and ideological terrain.

In her book Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez makes this important, succinct summation regarding the white “evangelical” Christian fundamentalists who are the backbone of present-day American fascism:

White evangelicals have pieced together this patchwork of issues, and a nostalgic commitment to rugged, aggressive, militant white masculinity that serves as the thread binding them together into a coherent whole. A father’s rule in the home is inextricably linked to heroic leadership on the national stage, and the fate of the nation hinges on both. [emphasis added]

The brute fascism of Trump and his backers has become so undisguised and unapologetic that the billionaire co-founder of the tech company Palantir has openly called for the return of public hangings in the U.S., as an important means of re-establishing “masculine leadership”! (Palantir is already negatively notorious for its surveillance technology in coordination with ICE and the overall repressive moves of the Trump regime.)

Some have told me that I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to say it anyway: The absence of college students, as a general phenomenon, from the crucial struggle against the Trump fascist regime is a disgrace. And I’m going to go on to say: If this were happening in earlier times—for example, the time of the civil rights and Black liberation struggles, and the anti-war movement of the 1960s—every campus across the country would have been shut down and students would be flooding into the streets in sustained protest.

“OK, boomer”—I know that’s the likely response. But, first of all, I have to say, I’m not actually a “boomer.” I was born before the beginning of the boomer period in 1946—during, not after, World War 2. But more significantly, this “OK, boomer” thing is a complete distortion of what that generation has been about and the tremendous contribution it made to the struggle against oppression, not only in this country but throughout the world, in its involvement in the Civil Rights and Black Liberation, women and gay rights movements, the struggle against the despoliation of the environment, the war in Vietnam, and on and on. That is the actual legacy it’s left, even if some, in fact far too many, from that generation have retreated from that into pale reformism.

At that time there was a whole generation, or the defining element of a generation, that was determined to bring about radical change and was supportive of a revolution, however they conceived of revolution.

The notion, widely held among the generation today, that earlier generations just fucked up the world so badly, and left this as a legacy for youth now, does not speak to the actual reality, and cannot be legitimately invoked as a rationalization for not actively taking part in the struggle now to change the world in a positive way.

Thanks to Tom Hanks and Tom Brokaw, we’ve heard a great deal of talk about the World War 2 generation as “the greatest generation.” Bullshit! The greatest generation so far was the generation of the 1960s. Not only was it the greatest generation, it can honestly be said, it was the first generation that in its defining quality recognized and acted on—that is, acted in opposition to—the actual nature of the system in this country, up against the power of this system.

But let me say this: All that I’ve said about “disgrace,” and so on, should be taken as a prod to transform this. It would be a great thing for other generations to surpass “the ‘60s generation.” Take this up as a challenge. Break out of the confines, both material and ideological, and join in the struggle against the Trump fascist regime and for a better world through revolution.

Still, fundamentally this is not a matter of “generations”—it is a matter of the system. The following gets at the deeper reality behind all the talk about “generations”:

It is very common these days to hear things posed in terms of generations, and for generations to be pitted against each other....

Generations are real societal groupings, and particular generations do have common experiences that differ from other generations. But, first of all, generations are not “homogenous”—they are made up of different classes, nationalities (or “races”), genders, and so on. And, even more fundamentally, everything that is experienced by people, of all different generations, is shaped by the system that people live within—most of all, by the economic system (the mode of production) and its basic relations and dynamics, as well as the corresponding social relations (for example, racial and gender relations) and the political system and the dominant culture and ideas that reflect and enforce these economic and social relations. (This is from my article “‘Boomers’—‘X,Y,Z’: The Problem Is Not ‘Generations,’ It’s The System.” Also very relevant in this regard is the article “Bob Avakian Responds To Mark Rudd On The Lessons Of The 1960s And The Need For An Actual Revolution—Infantile Expressions of Outrage, or Accommodation to This Monstrous System, Are Not the Only Alternatives.”)

With all the very real contradictions, there are, in this country, the potential forces for a truly emancipating revolution. Along with what has been said here regarding Black people, as well as Latinos and other immigrants, as I pointed out in “Breakthroughs,” the potential “bedrock” and key driving forces for revolution are those who catch the worst hell under this system, those impoverished and bitterly oppressed and repressed masses, who do exist in their tens of millions in this country, particularly though not only among Black people, Latinos and immigrants and other oppressed people—even as the revolution cannot, and must not, be limited to that, but must also involve people broadly from other parts of society, including in particular, yes, youth and students, who constitute what must become a crucial force in the revolutionary process. As has happened in the past, an upsurge of not just spontaneous rebellion but the growth of revolutionary forces among the bitterly oppressed, and a culture giving expression to that, can inspire and call forth growing numbers of people from other parts of society.

In sum, and in basic terms, the challenge is this: through struggle—both struggle against the oppressive system, and struggle against the harmful ways of thinking among the people that actually reflect and reinforce the oppressive system—bring forward the basic, bedrock driving forces for the revolution, while drawing forward forces among all sections of the people.

A little later, I will come back to a key force for revolution, in this country specifically as well as more generally in the world, which I have not spoken to yet. But, first, this key problem:

Strategic Orientation in a Changed World.

In a number of works, including “Breakthroughs,” I have spoken about the separation of the communist movement from the labor movement. It is a hallmark of reformist socialists that they attempt to base things, at least to a significant degree, on what Lenin identified as more bourgeoisified, or at least unionized, workers, which also happens to be a very small part of the proletariat in this country and is not what is the actual social base for revolution among the working class—namely the lower, deeper sections of the proletariat that Lenin identified in speaking about imperialism and the split in socialism.

There is clearly a role for that lower and deeper section of the proletariat in the revolutionary process, but the revolution will not be conducted and the advance to socialism will not be achieved as a result of a general strike, or just by relying upon that section—and certainly not by pitching things to the more narrow and immediate interests of the working class.

And there is the fact that in the world overall, “old models” for revolution won’t work now, even in the Third World as a general rule. The model of the Chinese revolution, which so many have tried to repeat—even though Mao said don’t repeat what we do—that model of waging an armed struggle in the countryside and then eventually carrying it into the cities has run up against very significant changed objective conditions which have posed very formidable obstacles to that strategy.

If you look at the experience, for example, of Peru in the 1980s and ‘90s and Nepal into the early 2000s, they both made advances in the countryside where the rule of the oppressive regime is less evenly imposed, where there’s more room to maneuver around the ruling structures, and where the people are heavily impoverished; all those things meant that it was possible to make certain significant advances in waging an armed struggle in the countryside and in bringing forward a lot of support among the masses of people for that armed struggle, which is why it wasn’t crushed quickly in the countryside. In short, the rule of the system was less uniformly imposed and not as powerful in the countryside, and the conditions of the people also combined with that to provide a favorable material basis for revolutionary armed struggle to have a lot of support.

But in both cases, both in Nepal and Peru, they ran into serious contradictions that they were not able to overcome once the attempt was made to carry the revolution from the countryside into the city, where you face the backbone of the state, of the armed forces of the oppressive regime. And in neither case were they able to break through. In fact, there were sort of opposite poles of the same error made in this context: In one case, the revolutionaries in Peru attempted to carry out armed struggle as the main form of struggle in the city, before the conditions had been created for that, and this led them into some bad situations where they were actually carrying out violent actions against people against whom they shouldn’t have been carried out; and this made it easier to repress them. On the other hand, when the Nepalese revolutionaries got to the same basic place, they gave up the armed struggle altogether and went for elections, to get elected to the government, which they did in the short run, but nothing fundamental changed, including the character of the society overall and the character of the state and specifically the armed forces enforcing the system.

Now, both of these struggles had very positive qualities to them, as well as serious mistakes, which were also related to ideological problems and errors, which I won’t get into fully here.

But the point is: without, again, making a dogma out of this and turning living science into dogma, it has to be recognized that you can’t just simply repeat a model when, first of all, the Chinese revolution itself was something of an exception—it was not in every Third World country that revolution was able to be made this way; but even beyond that, the fact is that conditions have radically changed in the world and in the Third World specifically, including the fact that for the first time in the history of humanity, the majority of people live in the urban areas, and the countryside has been significantly depopulated. That, along with the growth of bourgeois classes in these Third World countries and their ability to enforce their interests, as well as their collaboration with the imperialists—all these are dramatically changed conditions. So, as Mao himself actually said, you can’t just copy and repeat something which was successful before, even as the Chinese revolution in an overall sense was a tremendous inspiration and support for revolution throughout the world, especially at its high point.

Related to this in this country is what we can refer to, and have referred to, as the “George Jackson question” or the “George Jackson contradiction.” George Jackson was a Black prisoner who became a revolutionary while in prison, and then was ultimately murdered by the authorities on the basis of his having become a revolutionary, in essence. And he posed things this way, or one of the important contradictions he posed was this: to a slave (I’m paraphrasing, but this is the essence of it), to a slave who does not expect to live past tomorrow, talk of revolution in some vague abstract distant way, has no meaning. This is both true and an acute contradiction for revolution in general, but also particularly and acutely in this country.

If we could initiate the all-out struggle, and sustain and advance it, beginning now, that would go a long way toward dealing with this contradiction. It would create the basis to win large numbers of youth in particular, among the most bitterly oppressed but also among other sections of the people, and would create a favorable basis to wage the struggle to transform their thinking—their world outlook. (This happened in the Chinese revolution, even from the beginning of the armed struggle there.) We could transform not only the situation, but the basic outlook, orientation and morality of masses of oppressed youth, and others: what they are willing, and determined, to dedicate their lives to struggling for, and if necessary give their lives to.

But we can’t do that now—and an attempt to initiate some form of all-out struggle now, when the conditions do not exist to make it possible, would lead to a serious defeat, not only in more immediate terms but more strategically, with the demoralization that would involve among masses of people.

A fundamental principle of a real revolution is that it must have the active involvement and support of masses of people, and cannot be carried out—and must not be attempted—by a small group isolated from and lacking that mass involvement and support.

In line with that, what we can do, and need to do, is to actively prepare, ideologically as well as practically: preparing minds and organizing forces—fighting the power (actively resisting oppression and injustice) and transforming the people, for revolution—with all of this aimed at creating the basis so that, when the conditions come together, or can be brought together, the rare opportunity for revolution will not be missed, or squandered, but actively seized on. This is important as a basic orientation and approach—and it is particularly and acutely important in the present situation, which is a rare time when revolution could become possible. Through all this, while working consistently on this basis, it is necessary and crucially important to remain tense to the possibility of openings to make leaps in preparing for revolution, and tense to signs that the coming together of factors that make revolution possible is developing.

In the short run, and even most of the time, the desperate conditions especially of the most bitterly downpressed, actually can work against their active involvement in revolution—because they are, of necessity, consumed and weighed down by the desperate struggle to keep from going under and being able to provide for those close to them—but their condition of being downpressed by this system, and their longing for a way out, is strategically favorable for revolution. Grasping and acting on this understanding—dealing, in a living way, with this contradiction—is especially important in the times and circumstances we are living in now, when everything could come to a head and “come up for grabs,” and people broadly are forced out of their “normal routine.”

In terms of the basic approach to working for and then seizing on the situation where the all-out struggle for power can be waged, in works at revcom.us—including the 5-part series Revolution: A Real Chance To Win, and Revolution, Building Up The Basis To Go For The Whole Thing, With A Real Chance To Win: Strategic Orientation And Practical Approach—there are important elements of the necessary strategy for an actual revolution, yes in this most powerful capitalist-imperialist country. But, at the same time as it is crucially important for anyone seriously considering (or questioning) the possibility of this revolution to dig into these works, it is also true that there is a need for ongoing work to further develop and refine this strategic approach to revolution, especially given the way in which the conditions in this country, and the world overall, continue to profoundly and rapidly develop and undergo major changes.

Women.

To turn to a crucial force for revolution to which I alluded earlier: Another very important factor, with tremendously favorable potential for the radical transformation of society, is the pivotal role of the fight against patriarchy—and gender relations overall among all sections of the people.

The conditions that this system has created and continues to enforce, resulting in horrific oppression of women in many different forms, has as its other side the potentially crucial role of women in bringing about a positively radical, revolutionary solution. Yes, the deeper source of the oppression of women is the exploitative and oppressive nature of the system as a whole, and the contradiction between men and women, resulting from the unequal, dominant relation of men in relation to women, is a part of that larger and more fundamental oppressive nature of the system as a whole—and, yes, the spearhead of the struggle needs to be directed against the system as a whole—but that does not negate or eliminate the fact that in the relationship between men and women, men often act in the role of the oppressor, and this relationship needs to be radically transformed as part of the revolution to radically transform the world.

The crucial relation between the liberation of women and a revolution aiming for the emancipation of all humanity from all relations of oppression and exploitation, is captured in the following:

You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can’t say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution. (BAsics 3:22, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian)

Today, in this country, and in the world as a whole, there is indeed the powerful potential of women—and the fight against the oppression of women, in so many hideous and horrendous ways—to be unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian (communist) revolution, with its fundamental aim of putting an end to all forms of oppression and exploitation, everywhere throughout the world.

What I wrote in “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating” needs to be given powerful, liberating expression now, in opposition to the Trump/MAGA fascism, and the whole system that has given rise to this fascism:

Even with all the ways that the heavy chains of hundreds, and thousands, of years of oppressive tradition weigh down on the masses of people—and place a heavy burden particularly on the half of humanity that is female—there is a deep yearning to be free of all this, which not only leads to imaginary hopes of supernatural salvation but also erupts in unrestrained fury right in this real world. And that fury needs to be fully called forth, given a scientific, revolutionary expression—focused toward the emancipation of all the oppressed and exploited of the world, and ultimately all humanity—directed to fighting against the fundamental source of all the suffering: this system of capitalism-imperialism, with its suffocating and brutal, patriarchal male supremacy, along with all its other outrages. This takes on even more powerful meaning and urgent importance in the current situation in this country (and others), where the forceful assertion of raw misogyny (hatred of women) and patriarchal subjugation of women is becoming more blatant and unbridled, focused to a significant degree now in the escalating moves to even further deny women control over their own lives and their very bodies, with the right to abortion, and even birth control, being brought under mounting attack. Right now, this slogan and call needs to be taken up broadly and made a powerful material force: Break the Chains, Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution!

As I have spoken to previously, there have been profound changes in the situation and social position of large numbers of women, both within this country and internationally. To cite one important dimension of this, much of the sweatshop labor in the Third World involves women, forced to work under horrific conditions. At the same time, tens of millions of women and girls are ensnared and literally enslaved in the horrific conditions of international sex trafficking and prostitution. (This, in its full terrible dimensions, is analyzed in the essay by Raymond Lotta The “Industrialization” of Sexual Exploitation, Imperialist Globalization, and the Descent Into Hell, available at revcom.us.)

In this country, changes in the functioning and structure of the economy (as part of the increasingly globalized world economy) have led to extensive employment, and exploitation, of Black women (and other women of color), in the service and retail sectors in particular. There have also been significant numbers of women, including Black women, employed in government agencies—something that has been crudely slashed, cruelly reduced under the Trump fascist regime. At the same time, not only is there more opportunity for large numbers of women (especially white women, but some women of color as well) to find positions in the professions and in business, but this has also become a necessity in order for their families to maintain a “middle class way of life.” This situation where great numbers of women are employed outside the home, including a significant increase in the number of women in better-paid middle class positions, has seriously strained and significantly undermined the “traditional” patriarchal (male-dominated) family and patriarchal relations in society overall.

Yet the elimination of male supremacy is impossible within the confines of this system. This is true because male supremacy has been deeply woven into the fabric of this society, and because this system is based on capitalist commodity relations and exploitation—things are produced to be exchanged (sold), through a process in which masses of people work, for a wage or salary, to create profit that is accumulated by capitalists who employ them and control their work—a system in which the patriarchal family unit remains an essential economic and social component and requirement, even as it is being put under increasing strains. And the fascist section of the ruling class has, over a number of decades now, waged a relentless attack on Constitutional rights, and mobilized their social base of religious fundamentalist fanatics, to forcefully and often violently assert “traditional” patriarchal oppression—with the assault on the right to abortion, and even birth control, a major focus of this attempt to essentially enslave women.

What has gone along with the changing position of women has been an increased possibility and “space” for the assertion of gender “identity” and relations that run counter to the traditional oppressive gender relations—and, in vicious opposition to that, the often violent move to reassert and reinforce the traditional relations and to suppress anything that does not conform to this. Now, the Trump fascist regime has directed its venom against LGBT, and in particular Trans, people, underlining and accentuating the fact that the forceful imposition of “traditional gender roles and relations” will be a sharp focus of the overall contention over which direction society can and must take.

Another striking manifestation of the move to forcibly impose traditional roles and relations is the manifestations of “revenge” against the gains that women have made in the struggle against traditional oppressive patriarchy in many different forms. One prominent, vile manifestation of this is the degradation of women through the widespread promotion of pornography, often in the most grotesque and violent forms, along with the open assertion of “rape culture”—“your body, my choice” as fascists chanted after Trump was re-elected.

What I wrote 40 years ago now is all the more profoundly true and sharply posed today:

The whole question of the position and role of women in society is more and more acutely posing itself in today’s extreme circumstances—this is a powderkeg in the U.S. today. It is not conceivable that all this will find any resolution other than in the most radical terms and through extremely violent means. The question yet to be determined is: will it be a radical reactionary or a radical revolutionary resolution, will it mean the reinforcing of the chains of enslavement or the shattering of the most decisive links in those chains and the opening up of the possibility of realizing the complete elimination of all forms of such enslavement.

Dealing with repression.

In relation to all this, there is the importance of confronting and moving to not only oppose but actually defeat the severe repression the Trump regime is threatening, and is moving rapidly to enforce—for example, with its targeting of so-called “antifa” as a dragnet and broad framework in which to go after anybody who is (as they say) “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” taking supposedly “extreme positions” against deporting immigrants, and so on and so forth. It is only realistic and scientific to expect this repression to take leaps, and very likely in the near future. So it is necessary to be prepared, actively as well as ideologically in terms of orientation, to meet and defeat this repression, broadly mobilizing people in opposition to it, including people who have political disagreements with those targeted at any given time.

And through this fight, it is necessary to win more people, building up more organized forces, for the fight against Trump/MAGA fascism, in terms of the immediate situation, and for the fundamental goal of revolution—giving life to what we describe as the R/CR/More R phenomenon (that is, revolution and resistance against the system, met by the counter-revolution of the repression of the regime, and met in turn by calling forth more powerful resistance and building for revolution). This is going to be an extremely acute focus and front of the struggle against the Trump regime and for the possibility of something even more fundamental to change. So it is necessary, as I said, to be prepared both ideologically and practically, and to make this a mass question, and give life to the orientation of uniting all who can be united against this repression, regardless of even significant differences among those so united—but, at the same time, not allowing this, even as serious as it is likely to become, to cause people to panic and to backtrack on struggling against the regime and for more fundamental change.

This is obviously a very difficult and will be increasingly intense contradiction to deal with, and it requires the best application of science and of the necessary principles in order to handle it correctly. But handling it correctly is necessary and crucial in terms of everything that’s being talked about, and any possibility of a decent way forward and fundamentally a revolution.

Some essential features of the new communism.

So, in the context of everything I’ve said so far, I want to turn to the question of the new communism as a continuation of, but also a qualitative leap beyond, and in even some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed. (Here it is important to note that important grappling with major contradictions involved in the history of communism, including questions of epistemology and its relation to the communist revolution, is contained in the 2004 document Bob Avakian in a Discussion with Comrades on Epistemology—On Knowing and Changing the World.)

In “Breakthroughs,” at the start of the second part, on the new communism, this critical point is emphasized:

communism is not only not a religion, it is not a philosophy or an ideology in the wrong (that is, the subjective, unscientific) sense, something unmoored from, and ultimately in opposition to, a scientific method and approach. It is fundamentally and essentially a scientific method and approach for analyzing and synthesizing human social development and its prospects. But there have been unscientific tendencies that have developed within communism, which to a significant degree have run counter to its fundamentally scientific foundation.

And in the first of the Six Resolutions of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, January 1, 2016, there is this important statement:

The new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian, on the basis of 40 years of revolutionary work, represents a qualitative advance in the scientific approach to making revolution and emancipating humanity. It provides the foundation and point of departure for a new stage of communist revolution that is urgently needed in the world today.

This further leap with the new communism is of decisive importance, because as this Resolution makes clear:

Where there is oppression, there will be resistance—the masses of people will continually rise up against their conditions of oppression and those who enforce this oppression. But, without the necessary scientific theory and leadership, the struggle of the oppressed will be contained, and remain confined, within the system which is the source of oppression, and the horrors to which the masses are subjected will go on, and on. The new synthesis and the leadership of Bob Avakian represents and embodies the scientific understanding and approach the masses of the oppressed need to make the revolution they need—a revolution whose ultimate goal is a communist world—to emancipate themselves and ultimately humanity as a whole.

As Bob Avakian himself has emphasized, the new synthesis:

represents and embodies a qualitative resolution of a critical contradiction that has existed within communism in its development up to this point, between its fundamentally scientific method and approach, and aspects of communism which have run counter to this.

“Breakthroughs” includes an important discussion of the different dimensions of this crucial leap in the development of communism as a consistently scientific method and approach, contrasting this with how, in secondary but significant ways, previous communist theory had “run counter” to its fundamental scientific method and approach.

Prominent in this is the extremely important point that is driven home in “Breakthroughs” concerning the need to consistently pursue the truth, even when it makes you uncomfortable, and the relation between this and the overall goal of communism:

In terms of the new synthesis—the new communism, and the further development of communism through this—it is important to focus on epistemology, the theory of knowledge. The question of what your theory of knowledge is and how you proceed to determine the truth—or whether you even think there is such a thing as objective truth—is obviously pivotal and central to whether or not you are going to have a scientific approach to things. This statement of mine, which is found in Observations on Art and Culture, Science and Philosophy, concentrates a great deal, including fundamental dividing lines in epistemology and the overall approach to reality and its radical transformation: “Everything that is actually true is good for the proletariat, all truths can help us get to communism”....

What’s being spoken to here is the dialectical, and sometimes acutely contradictory, relation between going for the truth and carrying forward the struggle for communism, and the insistence that even when, in the short run, going for truth might cause you to suffer setbacks and cause you more difficulties, you still have to do that because otherwise you’re never going to get to the goal of communism.

Along with this crucial breakthrough in the development of communism as a consistently scientific method and approach, there is the firm rejection of a tendency that has all too often marked, and plagued, the communist movement:

And here we see the close interconnection between epistemology and morality. The orientation and principle that “Everything that is actually true is good for the proletariat, all truths can help us get to communism” is not only extremely important itself but is also closely related to the fact that the new communism thoroughly repudiates and is determined to root out of the communist movement the poisonous notion, and practice, that “the ends justifies the means.” It is a bedrock principle of the new communism that the “means” of this movement must flow from and be consistent with the fundamental “ends” of abolishing all exploitation and oppression through revolution led on a scientific basis.

A central and defining element of the new communism is concentrated in the formulation solid core, with a lot of elasticity, on the basis of the solid core as a basic principle and method in leading a process, including socialist society. In the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America this principle is spoken to and applied in terms of its relevance and application in socialist society and the transition toward communism on a worldwide basis. But it is also a more general principle beyond just its application in socialist society, as important as that is. It speaks to the need for a solid core around the basic objective of what all this is for—namely, advancing beyond exploitation and oppression, getting to a whole new stage of human development where there will not be the division and oppression between masters and slaves and all the terrible consequences of that. So that is necessary, on the one hand: the solid core has to have that objective firmly in mind, in terms of advancing to communism. But also incredibly important is the basic scientific method and approach for waging and for leading that struggle. That method and approach, and the principles connected with it, has to be at the core of leading the whole process. But, at the same time, this has to give scope and initiative to all kinds of tendencies and all kinds of pursuing different ideas and trends—thrashing through them to determine what will actually lead where things need to go. It is this dialectic between the solid core and the broad elasticity that’s based on that solid core, but has a life of its own—it’s the correct handling of that very complex and at times intense dialectic that is crucial in terms of actually being able to continue to make the advance toward communism, even when you’ve gotten to the stage of socialism.

This involves a principle that I’ve also given emphasis to: the willingness to be prepared to go to the brink of being “drawn and quartered,” particularly in socialist society. What is meant by that? “Drawn and quartered” refers to a barbaric means of executing people in prior times, where literally people’s bodies were pulled apart in quarters. This is speaking metaphorically here, referring to the extreme tension that comes from actually not only allowing, but encouraging, the necessary elasticity: people pursuing different trends, working their way through and struggling over different ideas and trends, and so on, which is necessary to make socialist society the living thing it needs to be and have a basis to advance and not be turned back, to actually move toward the goal of communism. To apply that principle all along the way, including but not limited to socialist society, can become extremely intense, and there will be times when it feels like you’re being—if you’re at the center of this, leading this whole process and being involved with the solid core and applying that solid core, you can feel like you’re literally being pulled apart. It’s going to the brink, in other words, of losing everything without allowing that to happen. And again, handling that contradiction, that very complex and at times intense contradiction, is going to be one of the crucial things that a growing core of leadership has to develop the ability to do.

I’ll speak to this a little more shortly, but contrary to all the attacks by people who don’t even know what principle is, I have no desire to be, and there is nothing positive that can come from, a one-man show. Yes, you need leadership, and when you have outstanding leadership that’s a great thing. But you need a growing core of people who are applying the same principles—and, yes, struggling with each other over how to apply them to the living and changing world.

This whole approach that I’ve talked about, epistemologically and in terms of solid core with a lot of elasticity on the basis of the solid core, represents an important advance beyond the previous experience of the communist movement and socialist societies led by communists, including the revolution and socialist society in China and the Cultural Revolution there.

Another key aspect of the new communism is what we’ve referred to as meeting the material needs of the people and of the revolution, not only in the particular country but throughout the world, without “turning out the lights.” Now an interesting thing that I learned of recently is that when some of our people led a discussion of this with new people (people who are completely new to this whole new communism), a number of these new people actually took this “not turning out the lights” literally. They thought it meant, literally, that you couldn’t lose electricity. Well, that’s an important thing, part of meeting the material needs. But “not turning out the lights” is a metaphorical way of saying: not suffocating the life out of things. You know, giving people room to breathe, room to express themselves and air to breathe. That’s what it means. It means giving rise to, encouraging and fostering, intellectual and cultural ferment, even when it isn’t directly in line with the policies of the government at any given time in socialist society, for example. That’s what it means: not “turning out the lights.” It means not having everything go dark in the sense of things becoming depressive and repressive and suffocating. So, that contradiction is identified as one of the key questions to focus on, both even in building the movement toward the revolution to overthrow the old system and bring into being the new system, but in the concentrated way this finds expression in socialist society itself and for the leadership of that socialist society.

Now, returning to the question of the application of “solid core, with a lot of elasticity on the basis of the solid core,” there is the emphasis in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America on the importance of dissent as well as intellectual and cultural ferment, which I have spoken to—not “turning out the lights.” The Declaration from the revcoms, We Need And We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System speaks to important aspects of this:

As set forth in this Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, the people in this new society will not only be allowed but encouraged and enabled to fully speak their minds politically, to express themselves freely through artistic and other means, to dissent and protest with constitutional and institutionalized protection of their right to do so. They will be provided with the means for doing this, because this is an important part of creating an atmosphere where people can “breathe” and feel at ease, and where they will be inspired to join with others in grappling with what will, and what will not, contribute to the emancipating transformation of society and the world as a whole.

This is why I have not hesitated to make this no doubt controversial, but also profoundly true and important, statement:

It is a fact that, nowhere else, in any actual or proposed founding or guiding document of any government, is there anything like not only the protection but the provision for dissent and intellectual and cultural ferment that is embodied in this Constitution [for the New Socialist Republic in North America], while this has, as its solid core, a grounding in the socialist transformation of the economy, with the goal of abolishing all exploitation, and the corresponding transformation of the social relations and political institutions, to uproot all oppression, and the promotion, through the educational system and in society as a whole, of an approach that will [quoting the Constitution] “enable people to pursue the truth wherever it leads, with a spirit of critical thinking and scientific curiosity, and in this way to continually learn about the world and be better able to contribute to changing it in accordance with the fundamental interests of humanity.” [end of quote from the Constitution] All this will unchain and unleash a tremendous productive and social force of human beings enabled and inspired to work and struggle together to meet the fundamental needs of the people—transforming society in a fundamental way and supporting and aiding revolutionary struggle throughout the world—aiming for the final goal of a communist world, free from all exploitation and oppression, while at the same time addressing the truly existential environmental and ecological crisis, in a meaningful and comprehensive way, which is impossible under the system of capitalism-imperialism. (This is originally from my 2021 New Year’s Statement.)

(Again, in the interview with me in early 2025 I discuss more fully the basic principles and methods of the new communism, as a continuation of, but also a qualitative leap beyond, and in some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed.)

Now, here are some of the crucial elements that are necessary in order to actually apply the new communism and build the movement toward not only the defeat and removal of the Trump fascist regime, but toward the fundamental goal of revolution. There is a need for a cadre of revolutionaries with a much deeper and more solid foundation in the scientific method and approach of the new communism, including its analysis and synthesis on the history of the communist movement. This is an immediate and critical need, and a real leap needs to be made through struggle to bring about this core—this cadre of revolutionaries that can be a leading core.

Then there’s the question of leadership itself, which is again a controversial question, especially with all the individualism afoot in the world, and particularly concentrated in this society, this parasitic imperialist country. The question of having a communist party, an organized vanguard, as the necessary and critical leadership for what is a truly world-historic communist revolution whose fundamental aim is nothing less than emancipating all of humanity from thousands of years of tradition’s chains—and with the achievement of communism actually doing away with the need for special groups acting as a vanguard. But not until those conditions have been created.

So this brings us to the controversial questions of vanguards and of individual leaders in the revolutionary process which are closely bound together (as the objections to this are closely bound together).

By way of introduction and foundation for a scientific discussion of this crucial question, there is the following:

In the Manifesto from our Party, Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, the parallels are drawn between development and change (evolution) in the natural world and change in human society. In the words of that Manifesto, the dialectical materialist understanding of human society and its historical development:

provides the basic answer to those who raise: Who are you to say how society can be organized, what right do you communists have to dictate what change is possible and how it should come about? These questions are essentially misplaced and represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of historical development—and the possible pathways of change—in human society as well as in the material world more generally. This is akin to asking why birds cannot give birth to crocodiles—or why human beings cannot produce offspring that are capable of flying around the earth, on their own, in an instant, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, and having x-ray vision that can see through solid objects—and demanding to know: Who are you to dictate what can come about through reproduction, who are you to say that human offspring will have particular characteristics and not others? It is not a matter of “who are you” but of what the material reality is and what possibilities for change actually lie within the—contradictory—character of that material reality.

In speaking to why vanguards are necessary, and at the same time the contradictions bound up with this, “Breakthroughs” contains this important observation: “In THE NEW COMMUNISM [that is, the book] it was put this way, and it is important to focus on this: the very contradictions that make a vanguard necessary are also the contradictions [particularly in the condition of socialist society, after the overthrow of capitalism] that can lead that vanguard back onto the road of capitalism.”

What is this speaking to and why is this important? Among other things, it has to do in particular with the role of intellectuals. Much as there has been in the so-called movements of socialism or progressive movements a lot of anti-intellectualism, the fact is that intellectuals are indispensable to any serious transformation of society. At the same time, there is a tendency for intellectuals to become divorced from the actual reality and the actual struggle that needs to be carried out to transform the world. So that is a matter of struggle and whether those intellectuals will remain grounded in a scientific method and approach and in the orientation of what this is all for—moving beyond all exploitation and oppression—or whether they turn against that or turn away from that toward more narrow, particular and personal interests.

But the fact is, you are not going to make a revolution without grappling with complex reality on a continual basis and sometimes in very intense circumstances. And you need a core of intellectuals to lead the process of doing that. Those intellectuals generally come from the more privileged parts of society, to put it that way, people who have the opportunity to get a formal education. But at times they also come from among particular individuals, including people in very desperate conditions, who somehow turn toward and carve out a space to develop as intellectuals, including people, for example, in prisons, as has happened and as we’ve seen in our own ranks of the revolution. So, from one source or another, you need this core of intellectuals.

Why do you need it? Why do you need a vanguard in the first place? Because the conditions to which the masses of people are subjected under this system, as I’ve spoken to here, prevent them from acquiring the basis and being able to consistently devote themselves to actually scientifically grappling with the questions of what is the cause of what’s going on in the world, and what possible means are there to actually transform that in a way that would be in the interests of the masses of people, and ultimately of humanity as a whole. This is a complex process in an ongoing way. And, again, you’re not going to be able to do this without a leadership, including a core of intellectuals that is capable of and applies itself to grappling with this. So to put it in concise terms, it is the very contradictions of the capitalist system (and all oppressive systems for that matter) that create the need for a vanguard. Because of this inequality, these divisions, the rare circumstance of a small part of society having the opportunity to develop in this way, while the masses of people do not: it is that which make a vanguard necessary.

On the other side of the picture, that difference carries over, and sometimes it’s a yawning gap, not just a minor thing, that carries over into the socialist society and it can be taken one way or the other: moving toward the eventual overcoming of this mental/manual antagonism, to put it that way, or it can reinforce the dominant position of those who, because of the contradictions of the old society which can’t be eliminated all at once, remain in a position above the masses of people, objectively. And I’ve made this point before, there is a real pull—and I saw this in reading Mao’s discussion with Kissinger, for example—there’s a real pull when you’re dealing in the realm of rarified ideas, or even practical questions but on a big scale, you get together and you can be talking in the realm of rarified ideas and you can get detached from and forget what it is you are supposed to be all about in doing that. You can get pulled over to either losing track of, or even turning back against, what gave rise to your being in that position in the first place.

So this is a constant struggle, but it can’t be resolved by doing away with vanguards. All that will do is guarantee that you will be remaining within the terrible confines of the existing system.

Again, returning to the basic point, the contradictions that make a vanguard—and yes a core of leaders—necessary are also the contradictions that could lead that to turn into its opposite; yet you can’t do away with that by not having that core of leadership. But you have to wage continual struggle to keep it going on the road where it initially started out and where it needs to keep going.

In “Breakthroughs” there is an extensive discussion of this contradiction, which is definitely important to dig into. Here I am going to focus on some key aspects of this which, especially in today’s conditions, are particularly controversial, even as they are very important.

To begin, there is the fact that, along with the leadership role of communist vanguards, in certain circumstances individual leaders stand out in their particular role, as a concentration of the role of such vanguards—and, as a matter of fact, a concentration of objections to this type of vanguard leadership.

A frequently repeated complaint in the opportunist attacks on the revcoms and myself is the focus on the importance of my leadership, and the claim that therefore we are a “cult,” and I am a “cult leader.” In a number of places, including articles at revcom.us, I and others have shown how this is crude and deliberate distortion. A particular distinguishing feature of these opportunist attacks is that they starkly reflect an overwhelming—in many cases, entire—and often deliberate ignorance of what I and the revcoms actually stand for and are working for, and specifically the content of the new communism, which has resulted from decades of work I have carried out, summing up the positive and negative experience of the communist movement and drawing from a broad range of human endeavor.

One of the variations of these opportunist themes is that I want to be a dictator. As the hour is indeed getting late (to paraphrase a line from Bob Dylan), let me speak clearly to this. The fact is that I have no desire or interest in being a dictator—but I do have a profound interest in and determination to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat (socialist state power) as the political means through which to bring about the fundamental transformation of society and ultimately the world overall, with whole new dimensions of human freedom, with the abolition of all relations of exploitation and oppression.

So let’s get directly into this question of outstanding individuals and individual leaders. It is a fact, which is generally recognized broadly by people, that outstanding individuals do emerge in all kinds of areas of society. There are even cults around them: Taylor Swift being one among the latest. But there is something different, and people react differently, when it gets to the realm of politics and actually or potentially “running society.” There, people recognize that the role of outstanding individuals will have a disproportionate influence on the way society is—and therefore on them, how this affects them. But, spontaneously, people have an unscientific understanding of this. It often gets expressed—again, especially with the extreme individualism—as: “I don’t want anybody to tell me how to think.” (Even sometimes: “I don’t even want anybody to tell me what books to read.”) This kind of nonsense. As though you’re not being told every day and every minute what to think by the operation of this system, which is working on you constantly, even as some people refuse to recognize it. The fact is, you’re being shaped by this system and its dominant relations and ideology and culture and political institutions and the operation of the system. You’re being shaped in how you think all the time. That is, once again, why people think there’s “human nature.” Because there is a way that people think and act on the basis of being shaped by the system—and the less they’re aware that that’s happening, the more they are vulnerable to it, and held in its sway.

So the question, really though, is not telling people what to think, but there is a real question of struggling with people over how to think. That is, whether to think on a scientific basis, with a scientific method and approach, or whether to go for any kind of subjective thing—usually more or less directly influenced by the operation of this system, or by people who are reflecting the outlook and values, and ultimately the relations, of this system. So, it’s not a matter of telling people what to think, and it’s not a matter of telling people how to think in a narrow sense; it’s a question of how people need to think in the broad sense—whether they apply an approach to objective reality of actually scientifically analyzing and synthesizing, looking at the patterns and the deeper relations, and drawing the necessary conclusions from reality, and then comparing that to reality by applying it. Whether they apply that method—or they just go for all kinds of personally pleasing subjective inclinations: that is the real question.

People can readily recognize, they can have a debate, “who’s the GOAT” in basketball. Is it Michael Jordan, is it Lebron James, or is it Wilt Chamberlain? They can have all kinds of debates about who’s the GOAT in basketball. But sometimes people say, “well, why do we have to put so much focus on an individual—isn’t science a collective process?” Yes it is. Just like revolution is a collective process. But it has leadership. Any team of scientists that is proceeding the way it needs to, needs to have and does have leadership.

Why is it called “Darwinism”? Because Darwin—there were others who were moving toward similar conclusions—but it was Darwin who synthesized and brought forward the scientific understanding of evolution. That’s why evolution is associated with Darwin, because Darwin actually was the one who made this breakthrough and popularized it. Why do people talk about “well, you don’t have to be an Einstein” to do this and that? Because Einstein made a big breakthrough in the science of physics. And you can go down the line. People can recognize that.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that, when a breakthrough is made—is firmly established on a scientific basis— the science stops. No, the need to continue to apply the scientific method continues, but it continues on the basis of the breakthrough that has been made (even as this may, and often does, involve further development of what is involved in that breakthrough, as is the case for example with the science of evolution).

The same applies in the realm of social relations and transforming society and the larger objective world. But people object because their individualism tells them, “Uh, oh, this might affect me, it might actually compel me to come to terms with what’s actually going on in the world, instead of just going by any old subjective thing that I saw on social media yesterday, or some idea that popped into my head, or ‘what everybody knows,’... ‘many people say...’” This is the kind of struggle that needs to be waged over what kind of outlook and method are people going to be applying. And when that outlook and method is associated with a certain group or a certain person who’s made a breakthrough—if that’s actually applied for the emancipation of humanity, that is a great thing, not a bad thing. It’s a great thing if that happens.

And speaking for myself, everything that I’ve done has been about furthering the possibility and the emancipating character of the transformation of society. People can take it or leave it—but it’s there, it’s given: I’m not charging a price for it, and I have no interest in being remunerated for it. It’s there to be taken. As I said, that is what I’m about, and this is what we collectively are about, not about imposing our rule over people and being a “dictator” in the unscientific sense in which people talk about that.

So, let’s get clear, the emergence of people in these different fields, including the field of communism, of the radical transformation of society to uproot and eliminate exploitation and oppression, is not a matter of “individual genius” isolated from the rest of the world and the rest of society. There are particular characteristics that people have. But it’s much more than “individual genius” or some special abilities and qualities in some “reified” sense; it’s much more a combination of factors, individual but above all social, including the role of accident, in how particular people come forward to play a certain leading role in different fields at different times.

It’s necessary to understand this scientifically as well. The basic question that should be examined by everyone is: What is the content of this? What is it aiming for? What are the methods and principles that it’s acting upon and applying? What is it calling on people to do, and where will it lead if people do take it up and go with it? These are the questions that should be central in evaluating the matter of individual leaders. When we wrote this polemic answering this attack, this low level attack by this Hannah Zeavin, our response posed the question: BA has a whole body of work; which works of BA has Zeavin (who by the way, is in academia), which of these collected works of BA has she seriously engaged (or engaged at all)? And I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to answer that question.

This is typical of these opportunist attacks. But on the other side, the point is: There it is, there’s the new communism. It’s open to everybody. The invitation is to everybody to engage it, to struggle to determine what it’s actually about and where it would lead. And to do so not only individually, but collectively with others. And then draw the conclusions on that basis. This is what we have to struggle for.

So, once again, vanguards—and, yes, at times, individual leaders—are both a necessity and a great thing for the cause of the emancipation of humanity if that’s what they’re actually based on, working for and making an outstanding, and a necessary, contribution.

We can put it this way. In terms of the fairly widespread (and at times quite virulent) opposition to individual leaders, regardless of the content and role of such leaders, it has to be said, once again, that a big part of this objection to individual leaders is the individualism that is so rampant in this most parasitic of all capitalist-imperialist countries. In essence, a lot of this objection amounts to“what about me—how can anyone be more important, play a more important role, than me?!”

In relation to all this, the following from Ardea Skybreak, in the interview with her, Science And Revolution, is very relevant:

And then there’s this other idea that some people put out: “Isn’t everyone equal?” Or shouldn’t our goal be to “make everyone equal”? Why do people say such stupid stuff?!

[she laughs] Look, it’s one thing to say that all human beings are “equal,” in the sense that every human being is a full human being and should be recognized as such. There’s no such thing as an “illegal” human being, there’s no such thing as a human being that’s only “one-half, or three-fifths,” of a human being, there’s no such thing as some kind of inherently “inferior” human being. All human beings are full human beings. That’s one thing. But when somebody poses the question, shouldn’t everyone be equal, what they’re really asking is shouldn’t everyone be able to throw their weight around to the very same degree, shouldn’t everybody be able to have the very same influence on things? Well, that’s not reality. I don’t know what kind of dream world you live in, but the reality is that different people in human societies have different degrees of influence, for good or bad reasons.

You know, there are some bad reasons why some people have disproportionate weight and influence. For instance, the people who run the government, who run this society, who run the police and the military, you’re not equal to them. OK? [laughs] The bosses where you work, who have the ability to throw you out on the sidewalk, you’re not equal to them either. Not because you’re a less valuable human being, but because you’re objectively not equal to them in terms of the social position you occupy and the influence you are able to wield. So these are examples where you can see that everybody’s not “equal,” since some people clearly wield disproportionate weight and influence of a negative nature.

The other side of this is that there are also people who wield disproportionate weight and influence of a positive nature, including in ways that can contribute positively to society, that can “serve the people” in various ways. Think of people who are “tops” in their fields, like a “top” doctor or lawyer or a “top” auto mechanic or a “top” athlete or musician. I don’t think of them somehow being “better” human beings than me, but I have no problem acknowledging that I don’t have their skills and experience in those fields and therefore that we are not all “equal” in that sense and therefore I wouldn’t expect to be wielding the same degree of authority or influence as those “top” experts in an operating room, on a basketball court, or on a concert stage, just to use those examples. But I’m not worried about that. I don’t feel threatened by that. We don’t need to be “equal” in every dimension of life. And the reality is we’re not all “equal” in terms of experience, skills and abilities. And in relation to positive things, it’s OK, it’s more than OK, if some people can wield more weight and influence. Which gets me back to BA. It’s not only OK, it’s more than fine, if BA is able to wield disproportionate weight and influence inside the Party he leads, in the larger movement for revolution, in the broader society at large. If he has the experience, skills and abilities that put him at the “top of the field” with regard to the analysis of the biggest social problems of this era and what to do about it, if he is objectively at the “top of the field” with regard to the development of the science of revolution and communism, then I, for one, want him to be able to wield as much disproportionate influence as possible!

(Ardea Skybreak is a scientist with professional training in ecology and evolutionary biology, and an advocate of the new synthesis of communism. She is the author of, among other works, the very important book The Science Of Evolution And The Myth Of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real And Why It Matters.)

This brings us back to the question of “breakthrough leaders” and the relationship between “breakthrough leaders” of this kind—outstanding people who do emerge in this way, as the quote from Skybreak was just speaking to—and the larger collective process. Both are indispensable if there’s going to be a successful revolution and a transformation of society that actually leads to emancipation.

But there’s been an historic problem in the experience of the communist movement in this regard, going back to the beginning. For example, with the development of the socialist movements at the time of Marx, after a certain point, seeing how these people were not at all putting forward what he was about, but doing it in the name of that, Marx was forced to make the comment: One thing I know is that I am not a Marxist. Now, obviously, this is an ironic comment. But it reflects the objective contradiction that people in the name of Marx and Marxism were putting things forward that were actually very divergent from and in many ways opposed to the actual thing that Marx was bringing forward, the breakthroughs that Marx made that were of historic importance.

Or you can look at the example of Lenin. He was surrounded by people who were not with him to a large degree through the course of building up the revolution and even afterward, but in an acute way, right at the point where the seizure of power was objectively on the agenda and Lenin recognized it while none of the others did. It was so intense that at one point Lenin had to threaten to resign from the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks if they did not unite with him to carry out the insurrection when it was ripe to be carried out—or the opportunity would have been lost, which would have been an historic crime.

The same thing with Mao. Mao had a certain small core of people with him at the very end, but, by and large, the majority of the leadership of the Communist Party, for the reasons I touched on earlier—including that many of them were just in it to make China a powerful country, once again, and not really for advancing to the emancipation of all humanity with communism—Mao found himself alone and isolated a lot, especially at the end. He made the ironic comment to someone who interviewed him, when they said, “Oh you’ve changed the world so much,” he said I’ve only changed a few kilometers around Peking (or Beijing, as they call it now).

So this is an historic contradiction that, once again, is finding expression in the context of the new communism. And this is something that has to be transformed. We can’t repeat the experience that I just summarized with these other leaders of the communist movement and the breakthroughs or crucial advances that they were leading and fighting for. Yes, there is going to be a difference—it’s important to talk about this objectively and I’m not talking about it personally—there is going to be a difference when outstanding leaders emerge and there are others who are not on the same level. But that can’t be made into a principle, and it can’t be allowed to spontaneously increase. It needs to be worked on so that more and more people are in line with and striving to be on the same level, even if they don’t actually reach the same level, but striving to be on the same level and be part of a collective process where, in that sense, yes everyone is equal—in the sense that all ideas have to be equally evaluated, no matter who is the source of them, on the basis of whether or not they actually are true. Whether or not they actually conform to reality as it is and is moving and changing, and where they will lead.

So, here’s an acute contradiction that needs to be addressed directly—and breakthroughs, further breakthroughs, need to be made. On the one hand, you have outstanding leaders. On the other hand, you can’t have a one-man show. You need a constantly expanding collectivity with a core, yes a solid core, of people who are firmly with that and who are striving to be on the same level, and in the context of that collective process all ideas are equal. Everybody’s contributions have to be evaluated on the basis that I just said and not on the basis of “well, you’re an outstanding individual and you’re not.” So this is an acute contradiction that has historic expression that we need to find a means quickly to transform in the positive direction, rather than allowing the spontaneity of it to take it in a negative direction.

Right now, in the ranks of the revcoms, there is very real and pressing need for a further leap—right now—in forging a collective core of scientifically-based leaders, firmly grounded in the method and approach of the new communism, consistently applying it and grappling with how to apply it to a complex and continually changing reality. This is necessary in order to draw forward and solidify—in a “finite” time frame, not in an amorphous time frame—a “critical mass” of dedicated, scientifically-based revolutionaries with a continually expanding, increasingly steeled cadre of “strategic commanders”—which is capable of drawing forward and leading continually growing broader revolutionary ranks with a solid foundation in the scientific method and approach of the new communism and correspondingly an ability to creatively apply it, capable of and oriented to confidently and energetically waging the fight to win growing numbers of people to this, including by waging principled and compelling struggle against unprincipled opportunist opposition and attacks.

So this is the essence of communist leadership and what people need to rise to: scientifically analyzing and synthesizing reality; identifying and ranking contradictions in any given situation, as well as overall, and knowing how to focus on the main contradiction at a given time, but handling correctly, in relation to that, secondary but still important contradictions. Keeping in mind that this, yes, involves learning from while leading real human beings—learning from while leading real human beings—not machines or objects. Keeping clearly in mind and proceeding on the basis of the emancipation of humanity as the fundamental goal, applying the science of the new communism, and specifically the method and approach of the new communism, toward that goal. And, once again, handling correctly the relationship of ends and means which is not only complex at times, but can become extremely acute, as we’ve seen in the history of the communist movement and socialist society.

It’s not some minor thing that the Soviet Union and then China, even with Mao’s leadership, took certain steps and went in certain directions that actually worked against what they were for overall, with the way that World War 2 was handled in the Soviet Union and the opening to the West, for example, by China. There were real compelling reasons. Nuclear weapons are not a joke. The slaughter of 25 million people in the Soviet Union is not a minor matter. These are real, and at times extremely acute, contradictions with monumental implications. And that’s why it’s all the more important to remain firmly grounded in, and struggle collectively to apply, the necessary scientific method and approach to deal correctly with the relationship of contradictions. What’s principal and what’s secondary at a given time? How might that be changing? How do you handle all that in the direction that leads where things need to go, even when in the short term things can be in contradiction to the fundamental goal? But you still have to handle that in such a way that overall advances things toward the fundamental goal of the emancipating communist revolution.

So, in conclusion, to return to an important point: the bloody (and repressive) nature of the bourgeois (capitalist) revolutions, including the American Revolution, is something that needs to be recognized. One of the things that’s driven home, in watching the Ken Burns series on the American Revolution, is how bloody it was. How much violence—you know they’re always talking about, “oh we can’t have violence”—how much violence there was in that American Revolution. How much brutal repression there was, including different forces taking revenge on people on the other side—back and forth between those who were loyal to the British Crown and those who were in the American Revolution fighting for independence, and so on. If you watch that series, which is definitely worth watching, you can see how bloody and brutal this revolution was, in a way that we actually don’t want the revolution we’re working for to be—and we have to work so that it’s not bloody in that way, with vengeful reprisals even against civilians. But that doesn’t eliminate the fact that the American Revolution was bloody for a reason. Revolutions, as Malcolm X said, are bloody. There’s no getting around the fact that that’s the character of revolutions—fundamentally because of the resistance of the existing ruling classes to revolution, their bloody violence to brutally enforce their rule. But if you watch the Ken Burns series, you see that this was a bloody and, yes, repressive and at times vengeful revolution, which was in fact led by and serving above all the interests of slave-owners, and aspiring capitalists of various kinds—and, as comes out in this Ken Burns series, that revolution marked the beginning of the quest for an American empire, including the expansion to the West (which took place at the same time as that revolution) with the actual genocide of native peoples. So this was at the same time the launching of an empire of cruel exploitation and, yes, blood-soaked oppression.

And there is all the terrible destruction and horrific suffering brought about by the capitalist system, as it has developed from that time (and in its even earlier origins) into a worldwide system of vicious exploitation and bloody oppression.

What is on the “historical agenda” now, if there is to be a way forward for humanity to a future worth living in—what is desperately needed now to make this possibility a reality—is a revolution to abolish this system that was brought into being through events like the initial American revolution. A revolution in this era to abolish this system of exploitation, oppression and massive destruction, and replace it with something far more emancipating. Despite the claims of the Ken Burns series that the American Revolution was the most emancipating thing and provided the inspiration for the most emancipating things in the history of the world, that was puny in comparison to the emancipating character of the communist revolution. Not only was it puny, but it was full of, and gave further impetus to and unleashed, vicious and horrific oppression and exploitation. Whereas the communist revolution needs to make a leap beyond all that, to the abolition of all that.

This is a revolution to abolish this system of exploitation, oppression and massive destruction, and replace it with something far more emancipating, especially as this capitalist-imperialist system has become completely outmoded (long past its expiration date) and poses an existential threat to humanity, as I’ve spoken to here.

The revolution that is needed now depends on a revolutionary situation: a profound crisis affecting all of society and its dominant and ruling institutions—and this revolution must involve not the acts of isolated individuals or of small groups disconnected from masses of people, but the increasingly conscious and determined action and support of masses, of millions, led by a far-seeing, scientifically-based force with deep ties and a powerful organized basis among those masses. And again—unlike all previous revolutions led by exploiting classes (such as the American, or even the French Revolution of a previous era)—this communist revolution must aim to transform all of society, and ultimately the world as a whole, to bring about the abolition and uprooting of all exploitative and oppressive relations everywhere and enable human beings, at long last, to give the highest expression to their humanity.

So, with all this in mind, the following, from my 2025 New Year’s Message, speaks to the essential reality and the urgent need and challenge:

[Trump/MAGA fascism] was spawned by this system of capitalism-imperialism—a system which, by its very nature, perpetrates continuing horrors, on a level far beyond what even most “informed people” have been led to believe....

The Trump/MAGA fascism... having arisen out of the soil of this whole system (and the whole history of this country), will unleash all this horror more fully and in more blatant ways, while at the same time the basic nature and dynamics of this system as a whole are subjecting the masses of humanity to terrible suffering, destroying the environment at an accelerating rate and heightening the danger of all-out war between the U.S. and its rivals in Russia and China—all nuclear-armed imperialist powers.

What I have sharply stated before stands out all the more urgently now:

We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.

There is a whole new way to live—with a fundamentally different system.

There is no good reason why the world has to be the way it is, with all its very real horrors.

There is no good reason why, beyond the massive death and destruction of World War 2, in the time since that war ended (in 1945) more than 500 million children have needlessly died from starvation and preventable disease, fundamentally because of the way the world, and in particular the poorer countries in the world, have been dominated by capitalism-imperialism, with the USA the “number one” imperialist predator.

There is no good reason why anyone, anywhere in the world, should go hungry, or be without decent housing, health care, and other basic necessities—or live in constant fear of going without these necessities.

No good reason for the endless wars and accelerating destruction of the environment, for which this system is fundamentally responsible.

No good reason why the dominant culture and ways of thinking should serve to reinforce murderously oppressive relations, while drilling into people’s heads the ridiculous notion that there is no positive alternative to all this.

No good reason why the long night continues in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.

There is no good reason for all this, but there is one basic reason: the fact that the world and the masses of humanity are still forced to exist under the domination of this system of capitalism-imperialism.

This system is completely absurd—criminally, monstrously absurd—and completely outmoded: long past its expiration date, past the time when it can lead to anything positive for humanity—and, on the contrary, it stands as the direct barrier to the emancipation of humanity from all this madness, atrocity, and unnecessary suffering. The rise of fascism, in many other countries as well as in the U.S. itself, is a glaring sign of the thoroughly outmoded nature of this system and the heightened danger it poses to humanity as a whole.

We are now at the point where it is more and more urgently necessary to move beyond this whole monstrous system—beyond a situation where people are forced to struggle just for individual survival, with everyone compelled to be in competition and conflict with others, and the masses of people everywhere are chained down by outmoded oppressive relations, while the future, and the very existence, of humanity is increasingly endangered.

And it is possible now to move beyond all this.

A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people. This is set forth, in both a sweeping and concrete way, in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have written. Summaries of basic points in this Constitution—shining a light on the truly emancipating way we could be living—are laid out in the Declaration WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM. (This Declaration, as well as the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, is available at revcom.us.)

Becoming part of the organized ranks of revolutionaries taking up the challenge of making this real—joining with THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity, working actively and urgently for this revolution—putting our lives on the line not for ourselves alone, or for a narrow circle or clique, but for the emancipation of humanity: that is something truly worth living for and dedicating your life to.

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA!

THIS WHOLE SYSTEM IS ROTTEN AND ILLEGITIMATE—WE NEED AND WE DEMAND A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM!

They’re Selling Postcards of the Hanging from the 2003 talk Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About

The following are excerpts from the above video.

In the ugly history of this country and all its horrors, selling postcards of the hanging, in particular selling postcards of the lynching of Black men, was literally a past-time, a kind of social activity in which all too many white people took part for 100 years and more, even after slavery was ended.

Thousands of Black people were lynched in those times and all Black people lived with the constant terror of this.

No Black male growing up in the rural South in that period could be free of that fear. Every Black male was scared and haunted by that fear. Think about what that means? And think about how that touched Black people as a whole.

And all this time, while all these lynchings and other acts of incredible cruelty were being carried out with all the oppression they embodied and enforced, all this time those who ruled this country, those who refused to do anything to stop these lynchings and other acts of terrors and atrocities, those who were responsible for these and other barbaric crimes, all this time they never stopped proclaiming ‘this is the greatest country in the world,’ ‘this is the greatest country that’s ever been,’ ‘this is the leader of the free world,’ ‘this is the homeland of freedom and democracy.’

It is not just that many white people act like acted like depraved beasts, and it is not that some were actually devils, although it certainly may have seemed that way many times in the history of this country. The deeper thing is that all these horrors were shaped by, they were encouraged by, and they serve to keep in effect a whole system.

A system that could not have existed without first slavery and then near slavery, and segregation and terror centered in the South while the great majority of Black people lived there, chained in one way or another to the rural South and on white-owned plantations. White supremacy is built into the foundation of this country. It is something this system and those who rule it could not do without even if they wanted to, which they don’t.

And this has continued down to the present: despite all the false claims these days about how this is now a colorblind society, segregation and discrimination continue against Black people and other people of color. Every time there is a study or a survey to determine this it shows without fail that segregation and discrimination exist in housing in jobs in schools in health care, in every part of society and this continues to be backed up with brutality and violence.

Watch the full talk here:

Go HERE for a bibliography and timeline of Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025

Keep Watching

The Bob Avakian Interviews, 2025: Humanity Does Not Have to Live This Way!

PART 1 Fascism, Capitalism, and the Way Out of the Madness

The Bob Avakian Interviews 2025, PART 1

BOB AVAKIAN OFFICIAL

·

FEBRUARY 16, 2025

Read full story

PART 2 The New Communism: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System

The Bob Avakian Interviews 2025, PART 2

BOB AVAKIAN OFFICIAL

·

MARCH 5, 2025

As 2026 begins, this major New Year’s statement from 2025 is worth revisiting.

2025: A New Year—Profound New Challenges—And a Profoundly Positive Way Forward in the Face of Very Real Horror.

This is Bob Avakian, with an important message.

POINT ONE: Trump 2025 is not just another administration coming into office. This is fascism: the undisguised dictatorship of this system of capitalism-imperialism in the world’s most powerful capitalist-imperialist country—openly and aggressively oppressive and repressive—a fascism fueled by anti-scientific and Christian fundamentalist lunacy, moving to forcibly impose its racist, immigrant-persecuting, woman- and LGBT-hating MAGA madness, determined to unleash unbridled capitalist plunder and naked imperialist expansionism, prepared to violently crush any opposition or resistance.

Contrary to what we are constantly told, it was not “the American people” who chose this fascism. There is not one undivided “American people”—there are “two countries” within this country. And:

The “two countries” within this country, in a real sense, is an extension of a fundamental division that has existed since the beginning of the so-called “United States” of America, with its foundation in slavery and genocide—a division which has never really been resolved throughout the history of this country—not through the Civil War in the 1860s, and not through changes that were brought about through the 1960s and in the years following.

As I have said before, there is a direct line from the pro-slavery Confederacy, at the time of the Civil War, to the fascism of today, with its determination to make America once again openly, aggressively white supremacist, male supremacist, and anti-LGBT people.

All this is why, as I emphasized in my social media message #111, this is “not a time for accepting this Trump/MAGA fascism as ‘legitimate,’ and staying within the confines of ‘how things work’ under this system, as Democratic Party heads and other ‘mainstream’ ruling class representatives are urging people to do. It is not a time for turning inward and attempting to ‘take care of self’ as the juggernaut of Trump/MAGA fascism gains momentum and crushes masses of people. This is a time for reaching out to all the others who feel the same outrage at Trump/MAGA fascism—a time for collective action and self-sacrificing struggle for the greater good: the greater good of defeating this fascism.”

This is a time for uniting all who can be united in determined struggle against this fascism, beginning now, before this fascist rule is fully consolidated, and in order to prevent it from being fully consolidated—a movement aiming to become so massive and powerful that it creates a profound political crisis, such that Trump cannot govern the country and implement his fascist program.

POINT TWO: This fascism was spawned by this system of capitalism-imperialism—a system which, by its very nature, perpetrates continuing horrors, on a level far beyond what even most “informed people” have been led to believe.

At revcom.us, the “American Crime” series examines one hundred of the massive unspeakable atrocities committed by the dominant forces in this country, from the very beginning and down to today. And, through my social media messages, as well as revcom.us and the YouTube RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, there is continuing scientific analysis of the basic nature and dynamics of the system of capitalism-imperialism that rules in this country and dominates in the world as a whole... why this system cannot be reformed but must be thoroughly abolished through an actual revolution... why this is a “rare time” when this revolution is not only urgently necessary but is more possible... how this revolution can lead to a fundamentally different and much better system... and how to go about seizing the time to actively work for this revolution, in the face of all the real and continually increasing horrors.

The Trump/MAGA fascism that is now moving to take power, having arisen out of the soil of this whole system (and the whole history of this country), will unleash all this horror more fully and in more blatant ways, while at the same time the basic nature and dynamics of this system as a whole are subjecting the masses of humanity to terrible suffering, destroying the environment at an accelerating rate and heightening the danger of all-out war between the U.S. and its rivals in Russia and China—all nuclear-armed imperialist powers.

What I have sharply stated before stands out all the more urgently now:

We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.

POINT THREE: There is a whole new way to live—with a fundamentally different system.

There is no good reason why the world has to be the way it is, with all its very real horrors.

There is no good reason why, beyond the massive death and destruction of World War 2, in the time since that war ended (in 1945) more than 500 million children have needlessly died from starvation and preventable disease, fundamentally because of the way the world, and in particular the poorer countries in the world, have been dominated by capitalism-imperialism, with the USA the “number one” imperialist predator.

There is no good reason why anyone, anywhere in the world, should go hungry, or be without decent housing, health care, and other basic necessities—or live in constant fear of going without these necessities.

No good reason for the endless wars and accelerating destruction of the environment, for which this system is fundamentally responsible.

No good reason why the dominant culture and ways of thinking should serve to reinforce murderously oppressive relations, while drilling into people’s heads the ridiculous notion that there is no positive alternative to all this.

No good reason why the long night continues in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.

There is no good reason for all this, but there is one basic reason: the fact that the world and the masses of humanity are still forced to exist under the domination of this system of capitalism-imperialism.

This system is completely absurd—criminally, monstrously absurd—and completely outmoded: long past its expiration date, past the time when it can lead to anything positive for humanity—and, on the contrary, it stands as the direct barrier to the emancipation of humanity from all this madness, atrocity, and unnecessary suffering. The rise of fascism, in many other countries as well as in the U.S. itself, is a glaring sign of the thoroughly outmoded nature of this system and the heightened danger it poses to humanity as a whole.

We are now at the point where it is more and more urgently necessary to move beyond this whole monstrous system—beyond a situation where people are forced to struggle just for individual survival, with everyone compelled to be in competition and conflict with others, and the masses of people everywhere are chained down by outmoded oppressive relations, while the future, and the very existence, of humanity is increasingly endangered.

And it is possible now to move beyond all this.

A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people. This is set forth, in both a sweeping and concrete way, in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have written. Summaries of basic points in this Constitution—shining a light on the truly emancipating way we could be living—are laid out in the Declaration WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM. (This Declaration, as well as the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, is available at revcom.us.)

Becoming part of the organized ranks of revolutionaries taking up the challenge of making this real—joining with THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity, working actively and urgently for this revolution—putting our lives on the line not for ourselves alone, or for a narrow circle or clique, but for the emancipation of humanity: that is something truly worth living for and dedicating your life to.

POINT FOUR—THE FINAL CRUCIAL POINT: Breaking beyond the confines of this system—breaking the stranglehold of its murderous enforcers—revolution is not only urgently needed, it is possible.

The fact that this system, in this country, has taken the extreme expression of bringing a fascist regime to power: this is a manifestation of the thoroughly rotten and illegitimate nature of this system as a whole—and the fact that the ruling class in this country can no longer rule in the way it has for generations, as a unified ruling class. Of course, the Democratic Party will try to work with—and get everyone to accept—Trump/MAGA fascism, in order to maintain the stability of the rule of this monstrous system, which has given rise to this fascism, along with all its other atrocities. But the reality is that contradictions and conflicts, within this country and in the world overall, will continue to cause major disruptions and eruptions, striking at the stability of this system; and—amidst the increasingly intense situation—a growing, conscious, dedicated and determined revolutionary force of thousands can become tempered and steeled, on a scientific basis—enabled to forge the means to work through all the difficult challenges to prepare the basis, and lead masses in the millions, for the emancipating revolution that is necessary in order to put an end to this madness and bring something much better into being.

This is a rare time when revolution has become more possible. And:

This rare time must not be squandered—wasted and thrown away. It must be actively and urgently seized on—to bring about a truly emancipating revolution....

The outcome of this rare time can’t be left to the brutal enforcers of this system, in one camp or another—or to any force which cannot, or will not, look beyond and lead people beyond the confines of an oppressive system, in one form or another. There must be—and there can be—an organized force of thousands, in a position to lead millions, to take this where it needs to go—to an actual, emancipating revolution.

With such an organized revolutionary force, it is possible to have a growing impact on all of society, changing the terms of how masses of people see things, and how every institution has to respond.

With thousands organized into the ranks of the revolution, millions can be won to revolution; and with millions won to revolution, there could be a real possibility for this revolution to win.

The basic approach to working for this revolution is set forth in important documents at revcom.us, including Revolution—Building Up The Basis To Go For The Whole Thing, With A Real Chance To Win: Strategic Orientation And Practical Approach. People in all parts of the country, in continually and rapidly growing numbers, need to join the organized revolutionary forces working consistently to carry out this basic strategic approach to bringing about this revolution.

In concluding, in light of the urgent need, and real possibility, for this revolution, I am going to speak to something that has been raised when the prospect of this revolution is brought forward: the claim that, in calling for and working to get people involved in this revolution, we are “going to get people killed.”

First of all, within this country itself, to take one terrible dimension of things, along with the millions of lives wasted and wounded through mass incarceration, thousands of Black people and others have been killed by police in the last number of decades—and this killing by police continues day after day. At the same time, a reasonable estimate is that tens of thousands have died as a result of gang conflicts in the inner cities. And for all of this, once again, this system is ultimately responsible, because of the conditions in which it has confined masses of people and the rotten values and putrid culture it has promoted, which poison people’s minds and pervert their morality.

Huge numbers of people are dying right now, all over the world, because of the wars, destruction, and deprivation caused by this system of capitalism-imperialism.

And human civilization as a whole faces the growing danger of outright extinction, through nuclear war as well as environmental devastation.

This terrible reality—and the fact that all this is completely unnecessary—is why we urgently need revolution. But, as opposed to how this system devalues, demeans, recklessly ruins and massively destroys the lives of people, we revcoms (revolutionary communists, based on the new communism I have developed) proceed in accordance with the fundamental orientation that, of all things in the world, people are most precious—and we are approaching the profoundly and urgently necessary revolution in the most serious and scientifically grounded way.

At the same time, there is no getting around the fact that, because of the nature of the system we are up against, revolution requires real sacrifice. But, once again, people’s lives are being sacrificed in massive numbers now, in so many meaningless and truly terrible ways—and we face the very real danger of massive destruction of human life, on a far greater scale—because of the dictates and as a consequence of the rule of this system we are now forced to live under. We revcoms are working tirelessly toward the goal of finally putting an end to such monstrous and completely unnecessary ruin and destruction of so many people, here and all over the world. In the interests of humanity as a whole, we are willing and prepared to make the necessary sacrifices—and to call on others to make the necessary sacrifices—to carry out the revolution that can bring about a liberating leap forward on the road to finally putting an end to all this madness and needless suffering and to bringing about a world where human beings can, at long last, move beyond the mere struggle for individual survival, as well as the heavy weight of thousands of years of oppressive relations, and can truly thrive as a world community of human beings, proceeding according to fundamental principles of cooperation, and capable of being fit caretakers of the earth.

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA!

THIS WHOLE SYSTEM IS ROTTEN AND ILLEGITIMATE—WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM!

This talk, from Bob Avakian, was given in 2017, during the first Trump fascist regime, and it is all the more crucial now, with what Bob Avakian has referred to as the “second coming” of the Trump regime and this fascism now “on an unrestrained rampage.” What if people had listened then?!

Go HERE for a bibliography and timeline of Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025

Join the Call for mass non-violent mobilization of millions in DC to drive the Trump fascist regime from power, initiated by Refuse Fascism and open to all.

Break with American Chauvinism: The U.S. Is NOT a Force for Good in the World

Excerpt from the 2017 talk by Bob Avakian THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America A Better World IS Possible

One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way, and weighing people down, is American chauvinism—the disgusting notion that America and Americans are better and more important than everybody else. This is a poison infecting people broadly in this country, even among the bitterly oppressed, and there is a great need for people to break with this American chauvinism. Free yourself from the GTF!—the Great Tautological Fallacy. A fallacy: an idea, or a way of thinking, that is false, wrong. A tautology: a round-in-a-circle way of reasoning that asserts something and then claims to prove it by merely asserting the same thing again. So, the Great Tautological Fallacy to which I am referring is the notion that America is a force for good in the world, and therefore whatever it does is good (or at least done with “good intentions”), even if the same thing when done by other forces, especially forces opposed to “us,” is bad, is evil—because... because America is a force for good in the world. Thus, in the grip of the Great Tautological Fallacy, when one is told by the authorities in government and the media, etc., that North Korea developing a small number of nuclear weapons and a few long-range ballistic missiles poses a “grave threat,” one does not question, one does not ask why that is a “grave threat,” while the only country ever to use nuclear weapons, the United States, having thousands of nuclear weapons and the capability to use them, anywhere in the world, is somehow not a grave threat. Under the influence of the Great Tautological Fallacy, one does not stop to think about the fact that, in this situation, North Korea could only be developing this weaponry as an attempt to deter an attack from the United States—for North Korea’s leaders know that if they initiated an attack, they would face massive, overwhelming retaliation—and from the point of view of the imperial rulers of the United States, such a possibility of deterrence is precisely the problem, because it could in some measure limit the ability of the U.S. to dominate and dictate.

Here is another example: Recently, Chelsea Manning, a former soldier, who took great risk and spent years in prison for exposing, among other things, war crimes by the U.S. military in Iraq, was extended an invitation to be a lecturer in an academic program at Harvard University. But then, when some government officials and others, including Mike Pompeo, objected and threatened to pull out of the program, Harvard disinvited Manning. Well, who is Mike Pompeo? He is the head of the CIA—an “intelligence” arm of the U.S. government which, without exaggeration, is an instrument of murder on a mass scale. Going back to the 1950s, and through succeeding decades, the CIA has worked through right-wing butchers, in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, and many others, to pull off coups that have removed popular governments from power and replaced them with murderous reactionary dictatorships. More than a million people have been slaughtered as a result of these actions by the CIA. But, through the lens of the Great Tautological Fallacy, the head of the CIA is a respected figure, and his denunciations of Chelsea Manning can cause Manning to be ousted from the program to which she was invited at Harvard.

Of great help in casting off the Great Tautological Fallacy is the “American Crime” series that appears regularly on revcom.us—where you can get a beginning sense of the scope and the depth of the atrocities that have been carried out, here and all over the world, by the rulers of this country, from the beginning and down to today.

But from childhood we are indoctrinated with the notion that America is a shining light of freedom, and the President of the United States is “the leader of the free world.” Well, when has this been true? Was it true during all the years of slavery? Or during the long years of Jim Crow segregation after the Civil War, when thousands of Black people were lynched while leering mobs of white racists celebrated, and Black people as a whole were subjected to constant terror? Is this a shining light of freedom now, when Black people have to take to the streets demanding “Stop Killing Us!” because the police kill a thousand people every year, many of them unarmed, especially Black people, Latinos, and Native Americans? When millions of women are battered and huge numbers are raped every year in this country, is this a shining light to the world? And what is this “free world?” Does it include the countries where the U.S. has backed and armed military juntas and other oppressive dictatorships, with their bloodthirsty death squads terrorizing the people, over the last 100 years and more, throughout Latin America and many other parts of the world? Does it include today countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey—all “allies” of the U.S. and all ruled by brutally repressive governments? Or what about the Philippines, where the government has carried out the cold-blooded murder of more than 10,000 people within the last year, and the head of state, Duterte, openly boasts of this? Does the “free world” include Israel, a nuclear-armed state that has occupied Palestinian land, in flagrant violation of UN resolutions, for 50 years, and forcibly maintains over a million Palestinian people in Gaza in what amounts to an open-air prison, living barely above survival level, and subject to repeated bombardment by Israeli armed forces, which in 2014, with full support from the U.S. government (headed then by Obama), killed over 2,000 people in Gaza, the overwhelming majority civilians, hundreds of them children. Is all this the “free world” of which the U.S. is the leader? Once you remove the blinders of the Great Tautological Fallacy, it can be seen that the “free world” simply means those parts of the world that are under the domination of, or are “friendly” to, the United States, no matter how monstrous their ruling classes may be, while the “non-free world” is made up of those who remain outside of, and especially those who pose opposition or obstacles to, the domination of the U.S. empire.

The U.S. government wages war in Africa and Asia, as well as the Middle East, claiming it is fighting to defend civilization against the brutal and murderous Islamic fundamentalist jihadists. But the imperialists of the U.S. are certainly no less brutal and murderous, and the “civilization” they boast of is literally built on the blood and bones of people all over the world. And why is this Islamic fundamentalism such a force now? Fundamentally because of the workings of capitalist imperialism itself. Besides the overall role of imperialism in creating more favorable soil for these Islamic fundamentalists, actions of the U.S. imperialists have further fed their growth.

In the 1980s, the U.S. actually armed and built up Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists to strike at the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In 2003, in violation of international law, the U.S. invaded Iraq to overthrow the head of government there, Saddam Hussein. This invasion was carried out under the cover of lies that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. This invasion, and the occupation of Iraq by American forces that followed, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, set off bloody conflicts among the Iraqi people and created more fertile ground for Islamic fundamentalist forces.

And the same thing happened in Libya. Under the presidency of Barack Obama, and with the insistent urging of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. intervened in a conflict within Libya on the side of forces opposed to the long-time ruler Muammar Qaddafi. With the fall of Qaddafi—which was brought about mainly as a result of massive bombing of his forces by the U.S. and its allies—the rivalries and conflicts within Libya were intensified, and Islamic fundamentalist forces gained strength.

Or take the case of Iran. In 1953, the CIA engineered a coup that overthrew a popular government that was moving to nationalize the oil of the country, so that it could be used for the development of its economy, instead of being controlled and plundered by the U.S. and Britain. This coup brought the Shah of Iran to power, and the people of Iran suffered decades of torment and torture at the hands of the Shah and his secret police. And, here again, these actions of the U.S. created more favorable ground for the forces of Islamic fundamentalism, which ultimately seized power through the revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979.

These are only a few examples of the American crimes that have been committed, and the kinds of consequences that have followed from these crimes, in countries all over the world. And all this underlines the crucial importance of casting off the blinders of the Great Tautological Fallacy and breaking with American chauvinism. We need to think about humanity, first and above all.

During the 1960s, a whole generation (or a large and defining part of that generation) broke with American chauvinism, cast off the Great Tautological Fallacy and, at the cost of real sacrifice, dared to stand up against the atrocities committed, here and throughout the world, by the rulers of this country, and fight for a better world. Unfortunately, all too many (though not all!) of that generation have become disoriented and have allowed themselves to become, as the French say, “récupérer”—that is, they have come back under the wing of the ruling class, in particular its “liberal” representatives in the Democratic Party, and have far too much accepted things on the terms of a system they once, very rightly, recognized as viciously criminal. But now, when the workings of this system have brought this fascist regime to power, there is, more than ever, a profound and urgent need for people, of all generations, to finally and thoroughly break with American chauvinism, and act in the interests of humanity.

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Elections under this system and why millions voted for Trump

Excerpt from the January 2025 Interviews, Part 1: Fascism, Capitalism, & the Way Out of the Madness

In January 2025, Sunsara Taylor asked Bob Avakian:

I want to come back to the more immediate horror that we’re facing with the Trump/MAGA fascist regime assuming power and all that this is going to mean. I think part of what hit decent people extra hard with this election is this time around Trump didn’t just win the Electoral College—he also won the popular vote. And so you hear it all the time, we’re being hammered with this notion that the American people chose Trump. The politicians, the media, they’re constantly bombarding us with this. Some people say this to make the case that Trump is legitimate, we should just accept him. And some people say this out of despair, like ‘There’s nothing we can do, the American people supported Trump.’ What do you say?

Bob Avakian:

Well, I say bullshit! There are a lot of different levels to this. First of all, in terms of the total popular vote, Trump got only a little bit more than he got in 2020—maybe about 2 million more votes. And you know Harris, his Democratic Party opponent, got far fewer votes than Biden, the Democratic candidate, did in 2020. So that’s one thing to understand—that was the major shift. Seems like a lot of people who had previously voted for the Democrat didn’t vote for one reason or another and it’d be important to actually learn more about what the reasons for that would be.

But that’s sort of on one level.

The fact is, actually Trump got slightly less than a majority of the popular vote and he defeated Harris by a couple of million votes. So right there you see that the idea that the “American people,” as I’ve said before, voted for this is ridiculous. The country was split down the middle and everybody knows it, even if they don’t want to say so—because the ones who don’t want to say so want to try to pretend that the only legitimate process is these elections.

And in fact, let’s step back a bit. These elections only present the masses of people with a choice between one or another group of representatives of the ruling class of this system of capitalism-imperialism, which we’ve been talking about. So those are your choices to begin with. And we could get into why are those the only choices. It’s not just that these political parties have a lot of money—billionaires and whatever backing them—which both parties do, by the way. But it’s also that the system can only function if it has political rulers or political leaders who are operating in accordance with the interests of this system, as they perceive them and strive to carry them out.

Anybody who tries to run for office who wants to present a program that would go against the fundamental interests of the system, will first of all be locked out and be minimized and marginalized, but even if they could somehow come to office, they would be confronted with the fact that there’s no other way to operate under this system than the way it already operates. And we’ve seen this phenomenon. This is why politicians say they’re going to do this and that, they’re not going to do this and that, and they turn around and do just what they said they wouldn’t do, or don’t do what they said they would do. Because the system enforces them to do that—it can only operate on certain basic principles and dynamics, which are rooted in its fundamental nature, which I was which I was speaking to.

This is what these elections are about in a in more basic sense anyway. So what you have is a contest between what’s the best way for this system to perpetuate itself, and particularly the ruling system in this country—the ruling class of this country—what’s the best way for it to perpetuate itself over the masses of people and to fight for, including in literal military conflict, to enforce its interest in the international arena. That’s what’s being debated out here and however people think that this election—whatever they think it’s about—that’s what it’s essentially about and that’s what they’re voting for.

A lot of these Trumpite MAGA fascists know that’s what they were voting for—they know they’re voting for bringing back what’s represented by the Confederate flag and all the misogyny and everything else. But beyond that, in more fundamental terms, the elections under this system are just a conflict or a contest between different sections of the ruling class over how to rule and pursue the interest of the system that they represent. That’s all these elections under the system can ever be about.

In these times you have a very sharp, even antagonistic, conflict within the ruling class itself over how to pursue those interests, both within the country and in the international arena. And as much as the Democrats, as soon as the election was over, tried to smooth things out and get everybody to go along and say this is all legitimate after all, there’s still this conflict between ‘Should we really roll back all the concessions that have been made in the struggle against the oppression of women and LGBT people and against white supremacy? Should we really roll all that back? Should we really, as Trump is saying, go and change the name of the mountain in Alaska back to Mount McKinley in order to assert the foundational white supremacy and whiteness of America?’ And so on so forth…versus Democratic Party politicians who think that more inclusion and diversity is the way to hold this system together.

Those are conflicts, which are real issues, but they’re always—in the elections and overall, on the part of these ruling class representatives and parties—they’re always fought out on the terms of the system itself. Never is there an election in which a major party and candidates actually put forward a program that would completely uproot all this oppression, discrimination, inequality, and all this rampaging in the international arena, and all this vicious super-exploitation of children and others.

I talk about children—I keep talking about this—the reality is that besides the hundreds of millions of children who died since World War 2, right now there are more than 150 million children being ruthlessly exploited and super-exploited in countries, particularly in the Third World, all over the world. This is what this system rests on and never in these elections is there anything that would touch on these fundamental relations and driving dynamics of this system.

You have—not just in this country but in a number of countries—you have a section of the ruling class and a section of the population that they mobilize that actually feels that moving to fascism is the best and really the only way to maintain the superiority of the system and of the conquering interests, if you will, of the country that they are part of. You have a section of ruling classes, not just here but in other countries too, that says that outright fascism—whether they’re willing to call it that or not—outright fascism is the way that this system needs to operate, the way it needs to be defended and extended. This is what we’re dealing with, but it’s all fundamentally on the terms of the system, which functions as I’ve described it, with all the horrors that I can barely describe in the time we have.

Go HERE for a bibliography and timeline of Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025

Take up the Call initiated by RefuseFascism.org, and open to all, for the Fall of the Trump fascist regime, November 2025—for massive, nonviolent sustained mobilization of millions in Washington D.C. determined to drive out this fascist regime.

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The Bob Avakian Interviews, 2025: Humanity Does Not Have to Live This Way!

PART 1 Fascism, Capitalism, and the Way Out of the Madness

PART 2 The New Communism: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System

The Christian Fascist majority on the Supreme Court is using religion as a weapon to rob people of basic rights -- and is backing up the fascist Donald Trump at every opportunity.

Too many do not understand this “unholy alliance” between Donald Trump and the Christian fascists. Share and spread the following excerpt from a talk given in 2017, during the first Trump fascist regime. This understanding is all the more crucial now, with the “second coming” of the Trump regime and this fascism now “on an unrestrained rampage.”

The “Unholy Alliance” Between Trump and Fundamentalist Christian Fascists: An Explainer.

Excerpt from the 2017 talk, The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible

One of the most distinguishing and significant features of this particularly American version of fascism is the “unholy alliance” between Trump and fundamentalist Christian Fascists. As I pointed out in another recent talk:

“Trump, I think it’s fair to say, could not have won the election if the Christian Fascists ... not only if they had opposed him, but if they’d been unenthusiastic about him ....And ... even when the ... pussy-grabbing thing came out, they didn’t turn against him (...Jerry Falwell, Jr. and all these others)—because they recognized: “Here is somebody who is going outside of the whole rules and the way this is done in the ‘swamp of Washington,’ who will actually carry through on this stuff [like outlawing abortion and suppressing gay people].”... And Trump, for his part, recognized that if he didn’t get this force behind him, he was not going to be able to do it....

“Pence is obviously a critical linchpin in this ... uniting of what’s represented by Trump ... and the Christian Fascists.... [T]he regular bourgeois institutions, ... like CNN, the Democratic Party and so on, ... they keep saying: ‘He can’t do that, that’s not the way things are done.’ But then [Trump] does it, because he’s not playing by those rules. He’s not working within the norms as they’ve been. He is going directly up against them, precisely as an important part of what he’s doing.”

And, while Pence plays a very important role in all this, he is far from the only Christian Fascist in this regime. Besides the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, who is himself a Christian Fascist, to the Supreme Court—re-establishing, after the death of Antonin Scalia, the right-wing majority on the Court—Trump’s cabinet is full of these Christian Fascists.

Perhaps it seems harsh, or even extreme, to refer to these fundamentalist Christians as fascists. Well, in Katherine Stewart’s book The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, she cites these comments by Rich Lang, himself a former Christian fundamentalist, who broke with that and became a liberal Christian pastor:

“When I was born again [Lang recalls], faith was something inside of you, something you were supposed to reflect through your life. But in the 1980s, something happened. Fundamentalist Christianity jumped back into the public square with the intention to reshape the country as a Christian nation as defined by them....

“It’s no different than the Nazis wanting to start with the Hitler Youth. That is where you’d want to start if you were trying to build a fascist movement....

“That’s the word, ‘fascism.’ Nobody likes to use it in this country. But I believe that in this country, underneath the appearances, that is exactly the great temptation of our time. ...[A]nd you have to call it what it is—‘Christian Fascism.’”

Stewart further summarizes Lang’s views this way: “Modern fundamentalism, like fascism in earlier times, he says, involves a strong feeling of persecution, typically at the hands of godless liberals or a religious ‘other’; the belief that one belongs to a pure race or national group that is responsible for past greatness, suffers unjust oppression in the present, and is the rightful ruler of the world; the impulse to submit unquestioningly to absolute authority; and the relentless drive for power and control. It is, he says, a kind of supremacist movement, with religion rather than race at its core.”

And there is this chilling statement by Lang:

“People have no idea it’s going on....

“What does it mean that the conservative church that’s growing in America is an end-times church? What does it mean that we are raising a generation of children to believe that they are the last generation? What is going to happen if we keep on telling them, ‘Don’t care about the environment, and bring on the war, because we’re going to be lifted out of here, and you can forget about loving your neighbors, because they’re just going to get blown away?’”

So, that is the insight of someone very familiar with these Christian Fascists. And the fact is that, in this country, with its whole history of genocide, slavery and racism, any form of fascism, including one basing itself on “Christian supremacy”—any urge to “restore past greatness”—cannot help but be bound together with white supremacy.

The Republican Party has been moving in a fascist direction since the late 1960s, with further leaps since then to becoming more and more openly fascist.

In running for President in 1968, Richard Nixon adopted what has been called the “southern strategy,” which the Republican Party has followed ever since. This is a direct appeal to white supremacy—to the racism of white people, particularly (though not only) in the southern states, who are enraged that Black people are not “staying in their place.”

The Republican Party is not “the Party of Lincoln”—as it sometimes demagogically claims to be—it has become much more the Party of the Confederacy.

With Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party took another leap on the road of fascism. Reagan very deliberately began his campaign for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where in 1964, three civil rights workers were kidnapped and brutally murdered by white supremacists. There, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Reagan proclaimed his support for “states rights,” which, particularly in the South, have long been code words for white supremacist lynch-mobism.

And after George W. Bush took things still further in a fascist direction—including the open use of torture and the active promotion of Christian fundamentalism—the Trump/Pence regime has made the leap into all-out fascism.

There is a direct line from the Confederacy to the fascists of today, and a direct connection between their white supremacy, their open disgust and hatred for LGBT people as well as women, their willful rejection of science and the scientific method, their raw “American First” jingoism and trumpeting of “the superiority of western civilization” and their bellicose wielding of military power, including their expressed willingness and blatant threats to use nuclear weapons, to destroy countries.

The truth—another terrible truth that must be faced—is that, in the context of profound and acute contradictions that are asserting, or re-asserting, themselves in ways that are tearing at the very fabric and deepening cracks in the foundation of this country, at the same time as the American empire is facing serious challenges internationally, fascism is one possible resolution of this, on the terms of this system and its ruling class, even as this is a horror for humanity.

While the Constitution does establish the separation of church and state—and the Christian Fascists are wrong, or simply lying, when they insist that the founding documents of this country established it as a “Christian nation”—the reality is that Christianity has all along been the unofficial state religion of this country, and the country’s identity, throughout its history, has been as a “white Christian nation,” grounded in male supremacy as well as white supremacy and driven by a “manifest destiny” to dominate not only the continent of North America but ultimately the world as a whole. All this has been brought into question, and has become the focus of intense struggle, going back to the 1960s and, in some important ways, back to the Civil War. And while developments internationally, including the demise of the Soviet Union, have given further impetus to the globalization of the capitalist world economy, this very heightened globalization has propelled changes that have sharpened contradictions within the U.S. as well as on the world level, particularly with an emerging capitalist China mounting a challenge to U.S. global economic dominance, at the same time as this heightened globalization, under conditions of western imperialist domination, has wreaked havoc in countries throughout the Third World, including the Middle East (and other places where Islam is the prevailing religion), adding fuel to a virulent Islamic fundamentalism that has declared war on the “decadent West” and on “infidels” and others oriented toward the West and facilitating its imperial domination.

In order to bring about any positive resolution to all this, even short of abolishing and moving beyond this whole system, it is necessary and crucial to break with the “normal routine” and the “normal workings” of the political process.

Go HERE for a bibliography and timeline of Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025

Take up the Call initiated by RefuseFascism.org, and open to all, for the Fall of the Trump fascist regime, November 2025 -- for massive, nonviolent sustained mobilization of millions in Washington D.C. determined to drive out this fascist regime.

The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime!

A Better World Is Possible.

Uniting all who can be united to defeat Trump fascism.

In the most fundamental sense, only a thorough transformation of society, through a revolution to break the hold of this system and bring into being a completely different economic and political system, geared to meeting the needs of the people, for basic necessities and for a stimulating and inspiring intellectual and cultural life, seeking the truth through scientific means and giving flight to creativity and imagination, with new relations among people that do away with all oppressive divisions—only this can bring an end to the unnecessary suffering that is continually inflicted on the masses of humanity and make possible a world where human beings can truly flourish.

Going back to the foundation of this country and the decisive role that slavery played in its rise as a capitalist power, and reflecting on the historical development of not just this country but human society more broadly, I have pointed to this profound reality:

Within the framework and limits of this talk, it is not my purpose, nor is it possible, to go deeply into the analysis of why this system cannot be reformed but must be abolished through revolution. I have done this in the book The New Communism, which not only speaks to why a revolution is necessary but also what the character of that revolution must be, and how that revolution could actually be brought about, even up against the tremendous power of the existing oppressive system.

And in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America a sweeping, and at the same time concrete, vision and plan for a radically different society and world is laid out, embodying a whole new dimension of freedom and whole new relations, among people and between people and the environment, beyond the narrow confines and the terrible consequences of the present system of exploitation and plunder.

But, whether we consider ourselves revolutionaries, convinced of the need for a radical overturning of the system and thorough transformation of society, or we believe that it is possible to bring about changes that will lead to a more just society within this system; whether our understanding is that America is not, and cannot be, a force for good in the world, or we hope it still can become that—all of us need to come together, and act together, with the urgency that corresponds to the terrible present and the gravely imperiled future that this fascist regime represents for humanity, and with the conviction that something far better is necessary and possible.

We may have differences about what that “something far better” is, and how it can be brought about—and we should continue to discuss and debate this, with the orientation of seeking the truth, whether convenient or inconvenient, comfortable or uncomfortable, and following the truth wherever it leads—but it is not only possible but crucial and urgent that we unite—and actively go forward to win truly massive numbers of people—to act, in a really meaningful way, to bring about the removal of this fascist regime before it can fully consolidate its rule and bring down the full effect of its horrific agenda. In the “Paul Krugman” article, I put it this way:

“Krugman is a proponent of capitalism, whereas I am an advocate of communism, a new communism, who is convinced that what is ultimately and fundamentally required to deal with the current horrors facing the masses of humanity, and the looming threat to the very existence of humanity, is a truly radical and emancipating revolution. But that is not the immediate question and challenge before all of us at this present moment. Rather, it is to deal with the grave danger posed by those now in power, through nonviolent but massive and sustained political action—the mobilization of first thousands, growing into millions, determined to get and remain in the streets until this regime is removed from power. Does not the common recognition that this regime ‘may end up destroying civilization,’ demand of us—of all those, of many divergent viewpoints, who can recognize that these are the stakes for humanity—that we act together, and do everything in our power, to bring about the massive political manifestation that is urgently needed to drive out this regime?”

Go HERE for a bibliography and timeline of Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025

Call to Action: Join the mass mobilization for millions in DC beginning November 5 to drive the Trump fascist regime from power, initiated by Refuse Fascism and open to all.

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In January 2025, Sunsara Taylor asked Bob Avakian: Can you speak to how you find the courage to make the sacrifices you have made, and how other people should find that courage—especially in these heavy times?

Answer: First you have to care, you know. I mean I could go into a whole thing, which I won’t do here, about my upbringing. Including some religious elements of it where my parents, especially my mother, were very religious, but it was a kind of religion that said you should care about other people and you should care about what’s happening to people. Not just those immediately around you, but more broadly, even though it was within a certain limited framework. And as I came up, I encountered all these things that were wrong, that were terrible, that were unjust, such as the treatment of Black people. And then as I learned more about other people who were oppressed and discriminated against, it became intolerable to me, and then at a certain point I encountered people who had a deeper understanding of this and I was willing to to learn from them. I was anxious to learn from them. I wanted to know, okay, look, these things are terrible. They’re intolerable. People shouldn’t be, to put it in basic terms, people shouldn’t be treated this way here and all over the world. As I learned more… how do you understand why this is happening? And there were people that I interacted with that had an understanding of this, up to a certain point. I listened to them, I argued with them when I didn’t understand what they were saying or I didn’t agree with it. There’s nothing particular about me. Everybody has their own specific development, in terms of where they come from and the experiences they have and all that kind of thing. But, you face junctures along the way where you come to understand more deeply what you’re up against.

And again, here’s where the increased scientific or the deeper scientific understanding enables you to understand more. But then you face again the question of, what are you going to do about that? Are you are you going to just pull back and think only about yourself, or does the thing that drove you to care in the first place drive you to understand more deeply and to get more deeply involved? That’s what has happened with me. And as I learned from other people along the way, I also applied myself where I thought there were shortcomings in what people, even people I greatly respected, what their understanding was. And what they said needed to be done, or what the problem and the solution was, to put it that way. I applied myself deeply. You know, I learned from them where they taught me a great deal and where I could understand that what they were saying was actually in accordance with what was actually happening.

You have to keep going deeper to understand": What is the cause of all this? What is it all rooted in? And how can you deal with it? How can you put an end to it? Is there a way to put an end to it? That’s a real question. It could be that there’s just a lot of horrors and there’s nothing that can be done about it. But as I pursued a scientific approach and have gotten deeper and deeper into that, I’ve come to understand that there is a solution to this. It’s not an easy one. It’s one that requires struggle and sacrifice and yes, courage, but it’s a real one. And it’s a pressing, urgent need for the masses of humanity that we all apply ourselves to bringing this about, because what’s going on, and accepting the way things are going, is both unnecessary and therefore all the more intolerable.

So that’s my own personal development and for whatever combination of reasons I have felt, for decades now, since I first really started learning about this and getting a beginning understanding of it, that whatever abilities I had, whatever strengths I’d been able to accumulate as a result of my own personal situation and development, need to be applied to bringing about and contributing as much as I can, along with others, to bringing about the actual solution to all this. So that’s what’s continued to motivate me.

Go HERE for a bibliography and timeline of Bob Avakian’s Work on Fascism: 1996-2025

Call to Action: Join the mass mobilization for millions in DC beginning November 5 to drive the Trump fascist regime from power, initiated by Refuse Fascism and open to all.

Learn More

See more from

The Bob Avakian Interviews, 2025: Humanity Does Not Have to Live This Way!

PART 1 Fascism, Capitalism, and the Way Out of the Madness

PART 2 The New Communism: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System

This talk, from Bob Avakian, was given in 2017, during the first Trump fascist regime, and it is all the more crucial now, with what Bob Avakian has referred to as the “second coming” of the Trump regime and this fascism now “on an unrestrained rampage.” What if people had listened then?!

Join the mass mobilization for millions in DC beginning November 5 to drive the Trump fascist regime from power, initiated by Refuse Fascism and open to all.

Why Are We Confronting A Fascist America?
The Long Story And The Short Story.

Excerpt from the 2017 talk by Bob Avakian THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America A Better World IS Possible

It is, however, very important to dig into the question: How did things come to this point, where we are confronting the real horror of a fascist America? Here, told briefly, is the “longer story,” the broader history that has led to this.

Thousands of years ago, human beings, who had lived for tens of thousands of years before in small hunting and gathering societies, settled on land and carried out farming and domestication of animals, particularly in the “fertile crescent” of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East areas. With this came the emergence of class division, the polarization between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, including the patriarchal oppression of women by men. As this way of life spread and took hold in large parts of the world, ancient civilizations and empires arose—for example, in India, Egypt, China, Persia, Greece and Rome, and then, centuries later, the Islamic empire, covering a large territory in the Middle East and parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. While built on plunder and oppression, they nevertheless brought forth many great achievements in architecture, art, music, the development of language and literature, science and other spheres. But the history of the rise of empires has also been the history of their decline and fall—because of contradictions and conflicts within them and because of invasions from outside forces, themselves driven by their own contradictions, conflicts and challenges.

This went on for thousands of years. But then, several hundred years ago, something dramatically new emerged: the development of the capitalist system. This is a far more dynamic system than previously existed in human history—a system driven by its own internal contradictions to constantly expand, to continually transform the technological basis on which it operates, to repeatedly intensify the exploitation of people on which its profits rest. And, again as a result of the contradictions and conflicts within and between different countries, and the rise and fall of different powers, it just so happened that it was mainly in Europe that capitalism first took hold and emerged as a dominant force on the world stage. This was accomplished, in its very foundation, through the most horrendous means. Karl Marx, the founder of communism, described, with bitter irony, the “rosy dawn” of capitalism: the massive hunting of slaves in Africa, shipping them in chains, in the millions, to be worked mercilessly in the Americas; the conquest of the original peoples in South America and their enslavement unto death in the gold and silver mines there; and atrocities of a similar kind that fed countless human beings, in far-flung parts of the world, into the relentless machinery of an ever-expanding capitalism. This, as well as brutal exploitation, including child labor, within these capitalist countries themselves, was the basis on which “western civilization” made leaps in its development and became the dominating force in the world, economically, militarily, politically, and culturally.

Capitalism, through all the horrors it has brought about, including two world wars and countless other armed conflicts, has in fact laid the basis for a whole new leap, beyondrelations of exploitation and oppression, and the madness of war and environmental destruction; but, at the same time—and this is now posed in very stark and acute terms—this system of capitalism stands as the greatest obstacle to this advance, and human society everywhere is straining against the confines in which capitalism continues to enchain human existence.

This puts in proper perspective and sharply refutes the racist notion of “the superiority of western (that is, white European) civilization” and the idea that somehow capitalism is the highest form of existence that human beings can attain and should aspire to.

And here is the “shorter story,” the more particular reasons why things have come to this crossroads in this country, with potentially disastrous consequences for human beings everywhere.

The USA is a country which established its territory and built the foundation of its wealth through the armed conquest of land, genocide, slavery, and ruthless exploitation of successive waves of immigrants to America. And it has continued as a country marked by white supremacy, patriarchy and male supremacy, and other oppressive divisions, while expanding its domination into an empire stretching across the globe, sitting atop a lopsided world of profound inequalities and plunder of the environment (it would take the resources of nearly 5 earths for the rest of world to have the kind of “consumer society” that exists in the U.S.)—all this backed up and enforced by a massive machinery of death and devastation, the U.S. military, and reinforced with a constant barrage of ideas and culture rationalizing and justifying all this oppression and destruction, propagated through an equally massive machinery of molding public opinion. Today, while the U.S. is, and loudly proclaims itself to be, the world’s number one superpower, it is riddled with sharpening contradictions, and facing growing challenges, within the country and internationally, and this has brought forth a fascist regime that now holds the reins of power, with the finger of a demented bully on the nuclear button—a regime that, without exaggeration, threatens not just greatly heightened suffering for the masses of humanity but the very existence of humanity itself.

So this poses sharply the immediate, urgent challenge we face.

Read or watch the full talk here.

Read A Major Statement by Bob Avakian, Revolution #141: The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime!

Take up the Call initiated by RefuseFascism.org, and open to all:

“Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now. Humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for future and rigged elections. We must drive the Trump Fascist Regime from power.

“Beginning November 5, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election, flood DC in nonviolent protest. Surround the White House. Surround the Capitol. Surround the illegitimate fascist-packed Supreme Court. Come back again and again. Across the country, refuse to comply. Every person of conscience, millions of us together, grind the machinery of the fascist regime to a halt.

“Don’t stop until Trump is removed.”

See the Full Call for Nov 5 from RefuseFascism.org

Over the past 30 years, I have analyzed how the Republican Party has been moving in a fascist direction since the 1960s, with further leaps since then to becoming more and more openly fascist. And now, with the “second coming” of the Trump regime, this fascism is on an unrestrained rampage.

It would have been far better—we would very possibly not be faced with the terrible situation we are now forced to confront—if this analysis, sounding the alarm about very real fascism, had not been so often ignored, or met with stubborn resistance and cheap accusations of being dishonestly “alarmist.” In a number of critical situations over the past decades, those of us who have recognized this developing fascism for what it is, have called for massive mobilization to defeat it—but, although some responded to this call, the millions who should have taken it up did not do so. So, now, here we are. And, while we should not “live” in the past, we definitely should learn from it.

Below is a timeline of selected talks and writings by Bob Avakian over the past 30 years that warned of the rise of fascism in the U.S.; exposed its roots in the soil of this country; addressed its accelerating development and expanding atrocities; and most recently, emphasized the urgency and the stakes of driving out the Trump fascist regime.

Most of the works listed below can be found at BA’s Collected Works at revcom.us, or through the website’s search function, as well as @BobAvakianOfficial Substack page.

See the hour long talk, Q&A clips, and trailer.

For a “comprehensive overview” of BA’s analysis and discussion of Trump fascism in particular, see The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America. A Better World ISPossible. This is a film of a talk given by Bob Avakian in 2017; it is also available as a PDF of text. These can be found in the Collected Works of BA at revcom.us.

1996

• Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones...We Need Morality....but not Traditional Morality(Essays written in 1996; published as a book in 1999)

1. Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones: The Reality Beneath William Bennett’s “Virtues”

2. Putting an End to “Sin”

1997

• Communism and Religion—Part 2: Christianity—Being Good Without God

• Major Transition and Upheaval—The Impact on Women

1998

• “The Truth About Right-Wing Conspiracy… And Why Clinton and the Democrats Are No Answer”

2004

• The Pyramid of Power—And the Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down

2005

• A Way To Understand What’s Going On: The Two Pats, And Andrew Sullivan... And Cornel West

• Bush I...Bush II...And Things Going to Extremes

• Changes in the World and the “Clash of Civilizations”—Within This Civilization

• Questions And Answers: Dictatorship And Democracy, And The Socialist Transition To Communism

• RELIGION AND UNITY-STRUGGLE-UNITY WITH PROGRESSIVE RELIGIOUS FORCES

• The Bible and Baby-Killing, The Right to Abortion and the Whole Direction of Society

• The Center—Can It Hold? The Pyramid as Two Ladders

• The Danger of the Christian Fascists and the Challenges This Poses

• The Deadly Illusion of the Swinging Pendulum

• The Fascists and the Destruction of the “Weimar Republic”...And What Will Replace It

• The Foolishness of Confusing Religion With Fundamentalist Fascism

• The Republi-Fascists... and the Republi-crats And Where Is the Real Alternative?

2006

• Bringing Forward Another Way

• Conservatism, Christian Fundamentalism, Liberalism and Paternalism... Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton... Not All “Right” But All Wrong! [audio tracks from 7 Talks] Track 1, Track 2, Track 3

• More on “The Coming Civil War”: Out of What Could This Civil War Arise?

• The Christian Fascists and the U.S. Military

• The New Situation and the Great Challenges

2007

• Christian Fascism and Genocide (Excerpt from Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World)

• Christian Fundamentalists, Christian Fascists (Excerpt from Away With With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World)

• Religious Fundamentalism, Imperialism and “The War on Terror” (Excerpt from Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World)

• MAKING REVOLUTION AND EMANCIPATING HUMANITY—PART 2: EVERYTHING WE’RE DOING IS ABOUT REVOLUTION

2009

• UNRESOLVED CONTRADICTIONS, DRIVING FORCES FOR REVOLUTION

2010

• Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon (Part 1: Revolution and the State; Part 2: Building the Movement for Revolution)

2017

• THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible A Film of a Talk by Bob Avakian (Available as film and text.)

2019

• “What Is Fascism—Statements from Bob Avakian”

• Fascists and Communists: Completely Opposed and Worlds Apart

2020

• A Statement from Bob Avakian—Nothing Less!

• BOB AVAKIAN ON “BARGAINS WITH THE DEVIL”—TRUMP FASCISM, “OBAMANATION,” AND THE SYSTEM THEY SERVE

• Donald Trump—GENOCIDAL RACIST-—10 Part Series (webpage/pamphlet PDF)

• DONALD TRUMP ISN’T “TOUGH,” HE’S A BLOATED BAG OF FASCIST FECES

• FASCISTS TODAY AND THE CONFEDERACY: A DIRECT LINE, A DIRECT CONNECTION BETWEEN ALL THE OPPRESSION

• “OH, NOW THEY’RE SAYING”—IT’S FASCISM!

• On The Immediate Critical Situation, The Urgent Need To Drive Out The Fascist Trump/Pence Regime, Voting In This Election, And The Fundamental Need For Revolution

• VICE PRESIDENT PENCE—FUNDAMENTALIST FANATIC, CRUCIAL FORCE IN THE FASCIST REGIME

• VOTING WILL NOT BE ENOUGH—WE NEED TO TAKE TO THE STREETS, AND STAY IN THE STREETS DEMANDING TRUMP/PENCE OUT NOW!

Part 1: The Democrats Can’t Fight Trump the Way He Needs to Be Fought
Part 2: Trump Is Already Stealing the Election and Threatening Even More Violence to Stay in Power
Part 3: Trump’s Fascism—More Blatant and Dangerous Every Day: How a Determined Fight and Massive Mobilization Could Defeat This (Long Version—The Larger Canvas and Fuller Picture; Short Version—The Basic Picture and Essential Vision)

2021

• SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution

• Bob Avakian On Fascist Lunacy and “Woke Folk” Insanity—A New “Two Outmodeds“

2022

• Yes, Someone Did See This Coming: Bob Avakian: 30 Years of Calling Out the Fascist Attacks on Abortion Rights

• Shameless American Chauvinism: “Anti-Authoritarianism” as a “Cover” for Supporting U.S. Imperialism

2023

• ANTI-SCIENTIFIC “ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM”—Serving American Imperialism and Promoting American Chauvinism

• SUPREME COURT: CHRISTIAN FASCISTS, STEALING IN THE NAME OF THE LORD

2024

• FASCISM AND THE WHOLE SYSTEM—Why the “Mainstream” Representatives of This System Cannot Fight the Fascists the Way They Need to Be Fought—and Why This Fight Needs to Be Waged as Part of Fighting to Abolish This Whole System

• REVOLUTION #31—More disgusting hypocrisy: The biggest bigots, the blatantly racist Trumpite fascists, are now posturing as opponents of anti-Jewish bigotry! And they are doing this to “justify” vicious repression against people actually opposing terrible injustice and atrocity.

• REVOLUTION #59—The Ten Commandments—a weapon of Christian Fascists.

• REVOLUTION #60—The Fascist Supreme Court Backs Up Fascist Donald Trump.

• REVOLUTION #96—Fascism Can Be In The Interests of An Oppressive Ruling Class—But Never in the Interests of The Oppressed.

• REVOLUTION #102—“Two Countries” Within This Country—And The Whole Damn System’s Got To Go! This is not a time for demoralization and despair—it is a time for righteous anger and revolutionary determination.

• REVOLUTION #104—How can I talk seriously about a revolution when the fascist Trump just got elected?

• REVOLUTION #105—NO: Accepting, and Refusing To Resist, This Trump/MAGA Fascism, Will NOT Make Things “OK!”

• REVOLUTION #106—Defend the Rights and Lives of People Targeted by Trump/MAGA Fascism. Take the Offensive in Opposition to This Fascism And The System That Has Given Rise to This Fascism.

• REVOLUTION #107—This is Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION, number 107—a special holiday message, 2024: God-Damnthe Trump/MAGA Fascists, Every One!And God-Damn Everyone Who Tells Us to “Get Along” And “Play Nice” With These Fascists!

• REVOLUTION #111—We revcoms are serious—and all decent people need to be serious—about actually defeating this Trump/MAGA fascism.

2025

• 2025: A New Year—Profound New Challenges—And a Profoundly Positive Way Forward in the Face of Very Real Horror.

• TRUMP/MAGA FASCISM What We’re Really Facing, Why and What Must Be Done to Defeat It Before It’s Too Late, Volume 1

• TRUMP/MAGA FASCISM What We’re Really Facing, Why and What Must Be Done to Defeat It Before It’s Too Late, Volume 2

• REVOLUTION #112—Trump’s fascist rule, like Hitler’s before him, is a regime of horrors—and is completely illegitimate.

• REVOLUTION #113—The Trump MAGA fascists would have been on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War, fighting to maintain, and expand, slavery.

• REVOLUTION #114—Defeating Trump/MAGA fascism: Looking to some future elections... or working now to mobilize millions around this powerful unifying demand: The Trump fascist regime must go!

• REVOLUTION #115—The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW—before it is too late!

• REVOLUTION #116—Black People Should Be Among the Front Ranks in the Fight to Defeat Trump/MAGA Fascism

• REVOLUTION #117—Trump/MAGA fascists—cruel, demented, dark ages oppressors—who twist reality inside-out to “justify” their lawless tyranny

• REVOLUTION #118—This system has brought forth Trump/MAGA fascism: People, in their millions, must put an end to this fascist regime—NOW—before it is too late!

• REVOLUTION #119—Democratic Party politicians may contribute to the crucial struggle against Trump/MAGA fascism—but the Democratic Party will not, and cannot, lead the struggle where it needs to go.

• REVOLUTION #120—Opposing the enemy within in the fight to defeat Trump/MAGA fascism

• REVOLUTION #124—Donald Trump’s whole fascist regime is caught in a contradiction of its own making: his continual Big Lies

• REVOLUTION #125—Not the courts, and not the Democratic Party: Decent people, mobilizing massively and relentlessly, are the force that must be relied on to defeat Trump/MAGA fascism.

• REVOLUTION #130—Blatant racism, overall fascism—not “fighting crime”—is the basic reason why Trump is illegally using the military to occupy cities and terrorize people.

• REVOLUTION #131—Crime is a real problem. But fascism is not the answer to crime—fascism is itself a monstrous crime.

• REVOLUTION #133—Yes, this Trump/MAGA fascism really is that bad. And, if it is not driven from power soon, it will get far worse.

• REVOLUTION #134—“Play by the rules” and lose—succumbing to a fascist horror, far beyond even the worst of today—or, do what needs to be done to drive out this fascist Trump regime.

• REVOLUTION #135—Now the MAGA maniacs are openly proclaiming that they are fascists!

• REVOLUTION #136—Truth is Truth, Fascism is Fascism—and why there is “no version of Charlie Kirk” on the “left”—part one.

• REVOLUTION #137—Deeper reasons why there is no “left” version of Charlie Kirk—and why the Democratic Party will not, and cannot, do what needs to be done to drive out the Trump fascist regime. Part 2

• REVOLUTION #139—Yet more genocidal racism from Donald Trump!

• REVOLUTION #140—Blatant racism and undisguised fascism are openly and officially celebrated—and people opposing this are threatened, attacked, hounded and sacked!

• REVOLUTION #141—The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime!

A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution

by Bob Avakian, Revolutionary Leader, Author of the New Communism

December 13, 2021

In the course of this talk, I will be referring to, and digging further into, key points that are put forward in two very important documents which are featured on our website revcom.us: A Declaration, A Call To Get Organized Now For A Real Revolution; and an article of mine, following up on that “Declaration and Call”: This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible—Why That Is So, And How To Seize On This Rare Opportunity. So, for everyone getting into this talk, everyone who cares about the crucial questions it is speaking to, it is also important to take up (or return to) and get deeply into those documents as well—and to go regularly to revcom.us, and watch the weekly YouTube show Revolution—Nothing Less, both of which sharply illustrate why a real revolution is urgently needed, and is possible, what are the goals of this revolution, and how to be part of building for this revolution. What I will be speaking to here is, as the title says, a necessary foundation and a basic roadmap for this revolution.

One other point: I am going to say what needs to be said about the way things are, why they are that way, where things are headed, and what needs to be done to radically change this in a positive way—and, as part of that, I am going to bluntly speak some truth that is bound to offend some people. I do this because the stakes in all this are so high, and (to refer to a line from Bob Dylan) the hour is getting late, and there is no time to speak falsely now. But I do this, not out of a sense that people are so deeply caught up in, that they cannot break with, ways of thinking and acting which serve to perpetuate their own oppression and degradation, and that of others as well. No, I am doing this precisely out of the understanding that masses of people not only need to, but can, make a profound break with this—that they can radically change themselves as part of, and in the process of, radically changing the world, in an emancipating way.

So, let’s get to it.

Here is the heart of the matter: Many people—including someone like Martin Luther King—have argued that attempting to carry out a revolution to overthrow this system is suicidal, particularly for Black people in this country—when, in fact, Black people, and masses of other oppressed and exploited people, profoundly and desperately need this revolution. The reality is that such a revolution can succeed, but this is possible, particularly up against powerful ruling forces, like in this country, only in rare times and circumstances. And here is a very important truth: This is one of those rare times and circumstances.

This rare time must not be wasted, squandered, thrown away. Rather, revolution must be actively prepared for and vigorously, consistently worked for—now, and in an ongoing way—to build up the scientifically oriented and powerfully organized forces for, and to prepare the ground for, this revolution.

And that is why we revolutionary communists say:

[E]veryone who can’t stand this world the way it is ... who is sick and tired of so many people being treated as less than human ... who knows that the claim of “liberty and justice for all” is a cruel lie ... who is righteously enraged that injustice and inequality go on, and on, and on, despite false promises and honeyed words from people in power (or those seeking power) ... everyone who agonizes about where things are headed and the fact that to be young now means being denied a decent future, or any future at all ... everyone who has ever dreamed about something much better, or even wondered whether that is possible ... everyone who hungers for a world without oppression, exploitation, poverty, and destruction of the environment ... everyone who has the heart to fight for something that is really worth fighting for: You need to be part of this revolution.

We’re talking about a real revolution, not playing around with a few changes that leave this system in place and in power, while benefitting only a small number. As the “Declaration and Call” makes very clear:

A revolution means a force of millions, drawn from many different parts of society and organized for an all-out fight to overthrow this system and replace it with a radically different and much better economic and political system, a socialistsystem, based on meeting the needs of the people and carrying forward the fight for a communist world where there will finally be an end, everywhere, to the exploitation, oppression, and destruction of the environment that is built into this system of capitalism-imperialism. Anything less than this revolution will completely fail to deal with the root of all the problems or lead to the actual solution. [Emphasis added here.]

So let’s get more deeply into why this is one of those rare times and circumstances when this revolution is possible, and what must be done for there to be a real chance for this revolution to actually succeed.

First, let’s get clear on these BASIC TRUTHS:

We live under a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism (capitalism is an economic and political system of exploitation and oppression, and imperialism refers to the worldwide nature of this system).

It is this system which is the basic cause of the tremendous suffering that people, all over the world, are subjected to; and this system poses a growing threat to the very existence of humanity, in the way that this system is rapidly destroying the global environment, and in the danger of war between nuclear-armed capitalist-imperialist powers, such as the U.S. and China.

All this is reality, and no one can escape this reality. Either we radically change it, in a positive way, or everything will be changed in a very negative way.

To be very clear once more: Changing it in a positive way means making revolution—a real revolution, to overthrow this system of capitalism-imperialism and replace it with a radically different and emancipating system. For it is also a basic truth that: In today’s world, to fundamentally change society, you must seize power—overthrow the existing state power and establish a new state power.

And here is another very important truth from the “Declaration and Call”:

We have seen the potential for revolution powerfully demonstrated in the summer of last year (2020) when millions of people, of all races and genders, all over this country, and all around the world, rose up together against racist oppression and police murder. We have seen this potential in the mass outpourings of women, in countries all over the world, refusing to put up with being abused and degraded. This potential is also revealed in the deep distress being expressed, by scientists and millions of ordinary people, about the continually worsening climate crisis and the threat this poses to the future of humanity—a crisis this system cannot solve, but can only make worse.

As we have also seen, when millions of people do take to the streets—and, especially when they do this not just for a day or so, expressing their feelings and then going home, with things returning quickly to “normal,” but when they do this with real determination and in a sustained way—this can change the “political atmosphere and alignment” in society as a whole, compelling every section of society, and every major ruling institution, to respond to this. To again cite a powerful example, this was the case with the massive uprising in the summer of 2020.

But, as important as it is, millions taking to the streets, even in a sustained militant way, cannot by itself lead to fundamental change—which can only happen if the system that they are rebelling against is actually brought down.

There have been many situations in different countries where a huge part of society has rebelled, even taking to the streets for weeks and months, but the ruling institutions, and in particular the police and military, did not “break apart,” and the people were not prepared to take the struggle to the next level—so there was no fundamental change. There have also been disastrous outcomes when people rising up in a mass revolt have mistakenly believed that, simply because their cause is just, the armed forces of the existing system will sympathize and join with them—when in fact those armed forces continued in their role as violent enforcers of the existing system and sooner or later acted to forcefully suppress the people.

No, the existing oppressive system must be overthrown—the institutions of violent suppression of this system must finally be broken apart, defeated and dismantled by an organized revolutionary force. That is what is necessary for things to go beyond just mass protest, however militant and determined, and become a real revolution.

Speaking specifically of this country, even in a situation where millions of people are taking to the streets, in a sustained way, in determined rebellion against oppression and injustice, and even with some among this system’s armed forces sympathizing and identifying with this, it is very unlikely that this, in itself, would lead to those armed forces splitting apart and a significant part of them joining with the people rising up in this way. (This is all the more true of the police, whose ranks are filled with hardcore right-wing brutes.)

It is a fact that one of the objectives of the revolution—and what would be a necessary part of the strategy of the revolutionary forces—would be to win over significant parts of armed forces that start out opposing the revolution. But the possibility of this, and the way in which it could be achieved, would depend on how the revolutionary process actually unfolded.

Later, toward the end of this talk, I will speak to this more directly, and get into some key aspects of the doctrine and strategic approach that would need to be applied by the revolutionary forces in order to have a real chance to win, when the necessary conditions for the all-out revolutionary fight had been brought into being—including the approach to winning over forces from the opposing side, in the course of that all-out fight. And, as part of that, I will talk about how, in an actual civil war, fought between opposing sections of society, things could develop in such a way that the armed forces that had been the backbone of state power, enforcing the existing capitalist-imperialist system, would split apart in the context of such a civil war—and what would be the implications of that for carrying revolution to a successful outcome.

But, before that, it is important to get into this fundamental question: What are the necessary conditions for a revolution? In basic terms, they are:

A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the “usual way of things,” that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the “normal” way that people have been conditioned to accept.

A revolutionary people in the millions and millions, with their “allegiance” to this system broken, and their determination to fight for a more just society greater than their fear of the violent repression of this system.

An organized revolutionary force—made up of continually growing numbers of people, from among the most oppressed but also from many other parts of society—a force which is grounded in, and is working systematically to apply, the most scientific approach to building for and then carrying out revolution, and which is increasingly looked to by masses of people to lead them to bring about the radical change that is urgently needed.

To get into this further, let’s start by focusing on the first of these conditions.

There is some important historical experience to learn from—situations where a ruling class was no longer able to rule in the “normal way” that people had been conditioned to accept, and a real possibility arose of putting an end to the existing system, even one which had been so powerfully entrenched that such a profound change had long seemed impossible. This has happened especially when the ruling class, or a section of the ruling class, of that system no longer believes in, and more or less openly abandons, what had been the “cohering norms”—the regulating set of beliefs and processes—of that system.

An example of this kind of thing—which involved a significant change, even though it was not brought about by a real revolution—is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the years 1989-91. The Soviet Union was the world’s first socialist state, brought into being through the Russian Revolution of 1917. The truth, however, is that capitalism had actually been restored in the Soviet Union, in the mid-1950s—even as it continued for some time to maintain the façade of “socialism.” But then, in the 1980s, “reforms” were instituted that began to unravel this whole thing, and finally sections of the ruling class abandoned the pretense of socialism, and the country underwent a transformation to an openly capitalist society, dropping even its outward identity as the “USSR” (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). The same kind of thing happened in some Eastern European countries that had been under the effective domination of the Soviet Union—countries where there were massive uprisings, the ruling structures split apart, and the result was a change from disguised capitalism to open capitalism—a major change, even if not a real revolution.

This, again, is part of a more general phenomenon where major change, and even a real revolution, can become possible (or more possible) not simply when there is a deep crisis in society, and not just when the ruling forces are seriously divided, but when they actually split apart, and the old way of ruling can no longer hold. Another example of this kind of thing is the creation of the Soviet Union itself, resulting from the Russian Revolution. This occurred during World War 1, in which millions of Russian people died and the masses of people overall suffered tremendous hardship. In this critical situation, the ruling forces of that country split, resulting first in the overthrow of the long-entrenched rule of absolute monarchs (the Tsars), but with an opening created for a revolution that overthrew the exploiting classes as a whole, including the bourgeois forces that were attempting to consolidate capitalist rule without the Tsars.

Or, to take another important example, this time from the history of this country: Why did so many Black people (nearly two hundred thousand) join the Union Army fighting against the southern Confederacy during the Civil War in the 1860s? Because the country, and those who ruled it, had split apart, and masses of Black people could sense that, in this situation, there was a real possibility of putting an end to their enslaved condition, which did happen as a result of that Civil War.

How does this kind of thing apply to this country now? As is becoming more clear every day, there are deep, and continually deepening, divisions not only in this country overall but among the ruling powers of this system. And, as I will get into more fully in a little while, one part of those ruling powers, represented by the Republican Party, no longer believes in or feels bound by what have been the “cohering norms” of “democratic” capitalist rule in this country. This is leading, and will increasingly lead, to further, deepening divisions and bitter clashes throughout society, as well as “at the top.” All the ruling institutions of this system will be increasingly affected by this. The polarization will continue to sharpen, with forces grouped around and led by the Republican Party becoming even more aggressive in insisting on imposing, including by violent means, their vision of what “makes America great,” with all the very real horrors, on top of horrors, that this involves.

All this in itself will have contradictory effects—some definitely negative, but some positive, or with positive potential. And, as this unfolds, this profound truth will be more and more forcefully demonstrated: The crisis and deep divisions in society can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means or radically emancipating revolutionary means.

With all this, what is urgently needed, what is possible—and what must be actively, tirelessly worked for, in order for there to truly be a positive outcome to all this—is a fundamentally different alignment in the country as a whole: a Repolarization that is favorable for, and brings forward the necessary forces for, Revolution—a real revolution to overthrow this system, and bring into being a radically different and much better system.

But why, and how, could it be possible to bring about such a repolarization for a real revolution?

This is because of something that is very different, in a very profound way, from what has been, for generations, the “normal situation” in this country. I spoke to how this has come about, in the following from “Rare Time”:

Even though “democracy, with liberty and justice for all” is a cruel lie, this lie has been crucial for the rulers of this country to keep things together under this system—and especially to keep people who are oppressed under this system believing in the possibility of making this system more just. This is why both ruling class parties generally agreed, for a long time, to work within the same framework for ruling this country—they agreed to accept the results of elections and bring about “the peaceful transfer of power” between the different representatives of this same system, whether Democrat or Republican.

With changing conditions in this country, and in the world as a whole, over the time since the end of World War 2 (75 years ago), it has been necessary for the ruling class, in order to maintain “order and stability” in this country, to make certain concessions to the struggle against white supremacy, male supremacy, and some other oppressive relations, while at the same time insisting that this is all part of “creating a more perfect union” and “further perfecting the great democracy that has always existed in this country.” This has also been necessary in order for the rulers of this country to continue promoting it as “the leader of the free world,” which they say must remain the dominant power in the world—but which, in reality, is the most oppressive and destructive power, plundering masses of people as well as the earth.

But a section of the ruling capitalist class, represented by the Republican Party, has all along resisted even these partial concessions to the fight against oppression, and has become convinced that these changes have now gone too far, that they threaten to destroy what has held this country together and enabled it to dominate the world.

The Republicans have become a fascist party—a party based on open and aggressive white supremacy, male supremacy and other oppressive relations—a party convinced that only it deserves to rule, moving to manipulate elections and suppress votes in order to gain and hold onto power, refusing to accept the outcome of elections it does not win, determined to gut and pervert “the rule of law,” trample on people’s rights, and adopt what amounts to an undisguised capitalist dictatorship, ready to use violence not only against masses of people but also against its rivals in the ruling class.

These Republicans have mobilized a significant section of people who believe, with an intense, irrational passion, that white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations (as well as unrestrained plunder of the environment) must be firmly upheld and enforced. They have been driven to a state of vicious insanity, embracing all kinds of lunatic conspiracy theories, along with a crazed Christian fundamentalism, as a response to the threat they see to their entitled (or “god-ordained”) position and their insistence that further concessions to the struggle against oppression will destroy what has “made America great.”

Every day, and in a thousand ways, the reality screams out that there is no living together with this fascist lunacy—and no one should want to! There is no way that any decent person should want to live in the society, and world, that these fascists are determined, that they are willing to kill, to bring into being.

As I wrote in my New Year’s Statement, this January (2021):

Biden and the Democrats cannot “bring the country together,” as they falsely claim, because there can be no “reconciliation” with these fascists—whose “grievances” are based on fanatical resentment against any limitation on white supremacy, male supremacy, xenophobia (hatred of foreigners), rabid American chauvinism, and the unrestrained plundering of the environment, and are increasingly expressed in literally lunatic terms. There can be no “reconciliation” with this, other than on the terms of these fascists, with all the terrible implications and consequences of that!

Early in his campaign for president, Biden bragged about how, as a senator, he was able to work with white supremacist, southern segregationists! Now, he is still trying to work with the blatant white supremacists and outright fascists of the Republican Party. But, try as he might, they are not willing to work with him—except on their terms.

Things are not as they were in the past, and the reality is this: The profound divisions, within the ruling class, and in the society overall, cannot be smoothed over—they are only going to become deeper and sharper, more acute and antagonistic. Here is the fundamental truth that needs to be clearly and deeply understood: These divisions

cannot be resolved within the framework that has existed, and has held things together, for nearly 150 years, since shortly after the end of the Civil War which led to the abolition of slavery—they cannot be resolved on the basis of the capitalist “democracy” that has been the “normal” means of capitalist rule (dictatorship) for so long.

And:

This rare situation, with the deepening and sharpening conflicts among the ruling powers, and in the society overall, provides a stronger basis and greater openings to break the hold of this system over masses of people.

It is extremely important to deeply understand this:

As this situation develops, and the ruling class is more and more unable to rule in the old way, society and daily life for masses of people, from different parts of society, can become increasingly unsettled and chaotic, with frequent “disruptions” of the “normal” way things have been.

And as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.

This is a crucial part of how a revolutionary situation could be brought into being—a situation where it becomes possible to actually bring down this system.

On the other hand, “left to itself”—that is, if the current character and dynamics of all this remain on the same course they are now on—this situation, the divisions characterizing it, and the outcome resulting from it are almost certainly going to become even more terribly negative. So, all this must be radically changed, in what is a relatively brief, “compressed” period of time—not just weeks or months, but also not decades. If things have not already fully erupted before then, the scheduled presidential election of 2024 is very likely to be a critical focal point and turning point, through which the fascist Republicans will attempt to gain and lock down power over society, and put an end to any possibility of a future “transfer of power” away from them.

With the Republicans’ continuation of the Big Lie that the last (2020) presidential election was stolen from Trump, their moves to suppress votes, and their whole orientation that, in any case, with regard to the 2024 presidential election (assuming there is one), the only acceptable outcome is that they are declared and confirmed as the winner—all this has made clear that they will allow no “peaceful transfer of power” in government, unless it results in their coming to power. Growing numbers of fascist-oriented people in this country are prepared to use violence in pursuit of their perverse notion of “making America great again”—and the Republican leadership is ready to resort to this, if they cannot come to power otherwise. Already Republican elected officials, including members of Congress, are whipping up sentiments in favor of such violence and supporting fascist mobs who have engaged in this violence.

In the situation of the 2020 presidential election, defeating and ousting Trump through that election was possible, and was important to do, as a tactical move to prevent the further consolidation of fascist rule right then. Even with that electoral defeat, however, Trump and his supporters nearly succeeded in pulling off a coup that would have resulted in his remaining in power, in defiance of the outcome of the election and the “peaceful transfer of power” from one section of the ruling class to another. And things have moved, and are continuing to rapidly move, beyond the situation that existed with that 2020 election and in its immediate aftermath.

Further, this system’s electoral process itself works against the kind of fundamental change that is now urgently needed. Among other things, it lowers people’s horizons, restricting “realistic choices” to what is possible within the confines of this system and conditioning people to view and approach things on the terms of this system. Continuing to vote for Democrats, and attempting, through the electoral process, to prevent a successful Republican-fascist seizure and consolidation of power, will very likely fail, and more fundamentally will contribute to the continuation of things on the disastrous course they are now on, with terrible consequences for the billions of people on this planet—for humanity as a whole.

As I emphasized in my New Year’s Statement:

The electoral defeat of the Trump/Pence regime only “buys some time”—both in relation to the imminent danger posed by the fascism this regime represents, and more fundamentally in terms of the potentially existential crisis humanity is increasingly facing as a consequence of being bound to the dynamics of this system of capitalism-imperialism. But, in essential terms, time is not on the side of the struggle for a better future for humanity.

Time, and with it the current momentum of things toward a disastrous outcome, is moving on. The time that still does exist must not be squandered in what would, especially now, be meaningless maneuvering within the framework of this system and its elections. This time must be seized, with the necessary urgency, to build toward the only resolution that can avoid that disaster, and wrench something truly positive out of all this: an actual revolution.

Through the rest of this talk, I am going to speak more fully to what needs to be done in order for there to be the basis to actually make this revolution; and toward the end of this talk, I will turn directly to the basic approach to waging the all-out fight for revolution, with a real chance to win. But here a crucial truth needs to be emphasized: Everything depends on bringing forward a revolutionary people, from among the most bitterly oppressed, and all parts of society, first in the thousands and then in the millions, as a powerful revolutionary force, organized from the start and consistently with a country-wide perspective, impacting all of society and changing the terms of how masses of people see things and how every institution has to respond. Everything must be focused now on actually bringing forward and organizing this revolutionary force.

The basic way to do this is laid out in the “Declaration and Call.” First of all:

We need to urgently change the situation where not nearly enough people know about this revolution and are with it. We need to get this revolution, and its leadership, known everywhere. We need to challenge and seriously struggle with people right around us, and all over the country, to do something that, yes, requires real heart and will make a positive difference for real—become part of this revolution, and follow this revolutionary leadership. We need to organize more and more people into the ranks of the revolution.

So what does it mean to go to work now to organize people into this revolution? As the “Declaration and Call” explains:

Organizing people into this revolution means reaching out to all sorts of people—not just where there are protests and rebellions against oppression and injustice, but everywhere throughout society—spreading the word about revolution and getting people together (in real life and online) to grapple with why an actual revolution is necessary, what such a revolution involves, and what kind of society this is aiming for. This will enable people who are new to the revolution to themselves become organizers for this revolution and to recruit more and more people to do the same. On this basis, and through the growing ranks of the revolution acting together as an increasingly powerful force, it will be possible to attract and organize the necessary numbers, and build up the necessary strength, to be in the position to do what needs to be done.

We need to struggle hard with people to take up the orientation and strategy, the values and goals, for this revolution, and dedicate themselves to working for this revolution, while we unite growing numbers to fight the abuse, brutality and destruction perpetrated by this system, and through all this get thousands and then millions of people prepared and steeled to do away with this system that brings so much hell to people. We need to wield this growing revolutionary force to stand up to this system and its murderous enforcers and to change the whole “terrain” (the political, social and cultural situation and “atmosphere”) throughout society, in order to weaken the hold of this system over people, win people away from acting to strengthen and enforce this system, and create the best possible conditions for this revolution to succeed.

Along with that, this basic understanding and approach needs to be consistently applied:

An important principle and method in organizing people into the revolution is the understanding that, while revolution requires serious commitment, people’s level of commitment will, at any given time, “essentially correspond to and [be] grounded in what aspirations have been awakened, or brought forward [in them], and what they are coming to understand is required in relation to that,” and this commitment “should proceed from what they themselves have been won (yes, won through struggle, even at times sharp struggle) to see as a necessary and essential contribution to the revolution.” People can start with basic tasks that they can readily carry out and feel confident doing which make a real contribution to building the revolution, and can learn to take on more responsibility as they gain more experience and a deeper understanding. The important thing is that they are part of the process of building the revolution, together with others. These principles and methods should be kept clearly in mind and applied at all stages of people’s involvement with the revolution, to enable them to continue advancing in understanding and commitment.

(That is from Part II of my speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution.)

As the “Declaration and Call” makes clear, in order to win masses of people to revolution, there is a tremendous amount of struggle that needs to go on, not just against the system that is the source of the horrors that people are continually subjected to, but also against ways of thinking and acting among the people that actually “internalize,” and serve to perpetuate, this system and the ways of thinking it promotes, with its monstrously oppressive relations and putrid values—ways of thinking and acting that work against the repolarization that is urgently needed to have a real chance at seizing on this rare opportunity to make revolution.

In Hope For Humanity On A Scientific Basis, I pointed to the characterization of the currentpolarization by the fascist former Republican congressman Steve King—that there is a lot of talk about another civil war, and one side (the fascist side) is heavily armed (with 8 trillion bullets) while the other (“woke”) side can’t decide which bathroom to use. Even as this involves some real distortion, and definite slander against trans people, there is a demented insight, and too much of the truth, in this observation by that fascist King. And, if this polarization remains essentially unchanged, it will have even worse implications, as things develop and further intensify.

Very much related to and an expression of this, is the reality that today, particularly among the middle classes, things are still way too much in line with the words of the poet Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It is fascists who have declared “this is war!”—who viscerally feel that the way things are going is completely intolerable to them, is an existential threat to a way of life and a country that they believe is worth being part of. And, in their demented minds, the government (or government that is in the hands of, or strongly influenced by, the Democrats) is working to continue things on this course, and is therefore completely illegitimate. At the same time, among what can rightly be called “decent people,” who are opposed to these fascists, there is way too much obliviousness, ignorance and ignore-ance—or even continuing denial—of what is going on, way too much being lulled by a sleepy sense that the way things are going is favorable to how they want things to go, or at least that “things will work out” in a way that is in accord with their inclinations. Or, to the degree that there is a recognition that this is not the case (for example, with the accelerating environmental crisis), this has led far too much to defeatism, cynicism, and passivity.

But that is not all there is to the problem. As I also noted in Hope For Humanity:

[A]nother element of this that we can’t overlook is that, while a lot of what [Steve] King describes applies in a certain demented way, particularly to progressive or so-called “woke” middle class people, there is another kind of problem with regard to more basic oppressed people, and in particular the youth—a big problem that their guns are now aimed at each other ... this is something that needs to be radically transformed in building a movement for an actual revolution.

I will have more to say that relates to this, later. But here it is important to call attention to what has been, so far at least, the “soft” treatment of those who took part in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol and Trump’s attempted coup—the low level charges and lenient sentences being handed down in the court cases around this, as well as the fact that there has been no move to indict Trump and other top fascist political figures. This calls to mind the way things were handled in Germany, with the rise of the NAZI fascist movement there, headed by Hitler. In the 1920s, Hitler led what came to be called the “Beer Hall Putsch”—a clumsy attempt to come to power through a poorly organized coup that lacked the necessary planning and support. But Hitler in particular was treated very leniently, and this “Beer Hall Putsch” became in effect a dress rehearsal for the later seizure and consolidation of power by the NAZIs, the crushing of any effective opposition, and all the horrific NAZI atrocities that followed. (The parallel is captured in what some people today have put forward regarding the coup attempt by Trump and his supporters in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and in particular the storming of the Capitol on January 6: “What do you call a failed coup? A dress rehearsal!”)

Meanwhile, what is the situation “on the other side of the divide,” and particularly among people who claim to be “woke”? It must be bluntly said that “woke” is becoming a joke—a badjoke. The slogan we revcoms have raised, “You Think You’re Woke But You’re Sleepwalking Through A Nightmare,” captures something very important. But it needs to be added that this “wokeness,” with its evading of and diversion from the real struggle that needs to be waged, and its substituting of “word changing” and “cancel culture” in place of this struggle, is actually contributing to and furthering this nightmare.

A ridiculous, and outrageous, example of this is the ACLU’s butchering of a statement by former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about a woman’s right to abortion: The ACLU actually replaced “woman” with “person” (and “she/her” with “they/their”)! This is part of a larger phenomenon which, in the name of trans rights, actually pushes in the direction of erasing women, conceptually. But rhetorically erasing the concept of women does not, and cannot, erase the reality of the existence, and the horrific oppression, of billions of women in this real world. What it actually does is undermine the massive, militant struggle that is urgently needed against the mounting attacks on, and the further fastening of the chains of oppression on, the half of humanity that is female.

If the ACLU, and others, who have done good things in the past, continue on this course, they will undermine much of the good they have done, and much they could still do, and need to do.

Do these “woke” and “progressive” people really believe that a focus on changing terms(nouns, pronouns, etc.) will actually lead to changing the world, in a positive way?

Do they really believe that calling oppression “agency” makes it less oppressive (for example, when women are caught up in prostitution and pornography, does calling this “agency” on their part make this something other than horrific oppression to which those women are subjected, and which does great harm to all women)?

Do they really think that having more “inclusion” of oppressed people in the dominant institutions and the structures of power of this system of capitalism-imperialism will actually change the fundamentally, and horrifically, oppressive nature of this system? (The First Black President... First female Vice-President... First Asian... First Latinx... First Gay... First Trans... First... SAME SYSTEM!)

Or is the deeper problem that these “progressive” and “woke” people have just given up on, or never really thought about, working for change that would actually lead to endingoppression?

With regard to “woke folk”—and in particular the whole “cancel culture” thing—it needs be said: Masses of people are being brutalized and savaged, the world is burning (literally as well as figuratively) and you are preoccupied with changing the faces of those who preside over these horrors, and spitting on people if they don’t use nouns and pronouns that you approve of, or in some other way violate the constantly mutating standards of “wokeness.”

This ties in with the discussion in Breakthroughs of a certain attitude and approach—“striking a pose to intimidate”—that was sharply criticized by Mao Zedong (the leader of the Chinese revolution, and what was a revolutionary socialist state in China until his death in 1976, whose “little red book” of quotations was widely read by people all over the world, including Black people, youth of all nationalities, and others in the U.S.). “Striking a pose to intimidate,” Mao made clear, is useless against the enemy, and does real harm among the people. As I pointed out in Breakthroughs:

[I]dentity politics, and in particular the posturing that all too often accompanies it, is only “useful” among people who will be intimidated by this, and in fact such intimidation does a great deal of harm. That’s what Mao meant when he said this kind of thing does great harm among the people. Intimidating people rather than winning them to a scientific understanding of reality, and what needs to be done about it, can only do harm among the people, and it’s absolutely useless against those who have real power.

Along with this, it has to be said that there is too much of people being absorbed in “trauma culture”—where any insult or affront, or challenge to one’s cherished beliefs, is treated as actual trauma, and any real trauma that is suffered becomes a motivation to turn inward to focus on individual “self-care.”

In Hope For Humanity, I emphasized this:

The trauma that results from directly suffering horrific forms of oppression and degradation is very real, and no one should deny or underestimate that—but, instead of an individual “turning inwards,” this needs to be transformed into anger and determination to be part of a collective struggle to put an end to all the atrocities, everywhere, whose fundamental source and cause is this system of capitalism-imperialism.

But, along with “trauma culture”—and I am going to call this out, even though it may “overlap” with some of what is asserted by fascists, coming from a completely opposite place and with completely opposite objectives—it is too much the case that, despite often ill-founded, ridiculous and even cartoonish references to “badass” this and that, too many people are being encouraged and conditioned to be “soft crybabies”!

Here I have to say: Enough of “woke folk” who act as if it is actually oppressed people (or, as they like to say, the “marginalized”) who are fragile beings constantly in need of the protection of “safe spaces,” lest they fall apart at the mere appearance of a “triggering” phenomenon. And since when are universities and other institutions supposed to be places where you are “safe”—not just from physical violence of one kind or another, and from overtly threatening or clearly degrading verbal assaults, but from ideas, statements, etc., that simply make you uncomfortable?! How are you going to “change the world” if you are in danger of falling apart at things like that? Again, from Hope For Humanity:

[I]n any real struggle to deal with any real oppression, up against powerful enforcers of that oppression, you are going to have to face the prospect of real sacrifice, including the prospect of being physically attacked. And if you think that you can carve out little safe enclaves, and that this is somehow going to lead to any kind of significant change in society, you are full of illusions and delusions.

To add to the problem, this is often accompanied by attempts to sideline and silence others who, according to this scheme of things, occupy a “privileged” and not a “marginalized,” status.

This is all an expression of extremely lowered sights—with a marked tendency to identify the “enemy” as people who may have more “privilege,” rather than the system of capitalism-imperialism, its fundamental relations, and its institutions of authority and power, which embody and enforce the terrible exploitation and oppression that masses of people here, and literally billions of people around the world, are subjected to.

Here again we are back to Mao’s point about striking a pose to intimidate—that it is uselessagainst the actual enemy and does real harm among the people.

All this represents the influence of forces proceeding from a bourgeois (or petty bourgeois) outlook and aspirations—seeking a re-arrangement which will provide them (and perhaps some others like them) with a better position within this horrific system of oppression, and trying to force opposition to injustice into the framework and in the service of this objective.

So, once again, with all this in mind, and with regard to the society overall, what is profoundly and urgently needed is repolarization—for revolution: winning growing numbers of people away from support for either side in the division among the ruling powers that are seeking to maintain and enforce this system, in one form or another, away from those promoting deadly illusions and self-serving goals which are dead-end, non-solutions for the masses of people.

This goes back to the first of the three conditions for revolution—the deep divisions among the ruling powers—and more particularly that, with the conflicts among the ruling forces increasingly becoming really deep and sharp, masses of people respond to this not by falling in behind one side or the other of the oppressive rulers—not by acting in ways that serve to perpetuate and reinforce the oppressive rule of this system—but by taking advantage of this situation to build up the forces for revolution.

It is true that there are a lot of very bad things connected with the present polarization and the whole trajectory things are on, and this could lead to something really terrible; but it is also true, and of profound importance, that it is possible that we could wrench something really positive out of it—revolution, to put an end to this system and bring something much better into being. But, once more, this requires recognizing the situation, and the current trajectory of things, for what they are—and responding in a way and on a level that is commensurate with this, is in accordance with the profound stakes involved—acting to change things, urgently, toward the goal of getting rid of this whole system, and replacing it with something radically different and much better.

The reality now is that the fascist section of the ruling class, represented by and concentrated in the Republican Party, is actively and aggressively engaged in a “two-pronged” move to achieve and consolidate fascist rule. These “two prongs” are: corrupting and controlling the electoral process and key government institutions; and the threat and use of violence, including through the mobilization of violent mobs. These fascists are, for now, relying mainly on the first, but with the second (violence) as an “accompaniment” to this—which could become their main means, if that proves necessary for them. In any case, if they succeed, the full power of the government—including the executive power of the presidency, the courts and legal apparatus, the prisons, as well as the police and the military—will be wielded to crush any effective opposition to fascist rule and to forcefully impose its program of “restoring” America to its mythological “greatness” on the basis of aggressive white supremacy, crude and brutal male supremacy and suppression of LGBT people, xenophobia (hatred and persecution of foreigners and immigrants, particularly from what Trump infamously referred to as “shithole countries”), forceful assertion and chauvinistic trumpeting of American dominance and “the superiority of western civilization,” along with willful rejection of science and the scientific method, especially where it would interfere with unrestrained plunder of the environment, as well as people.

Given the nature, objectives and actions of the fascists, there is the real possibility of actual civil war. But given the nature, objectives and actions of the “mainstream” section of the ruling class (as represented by the Democratic Party and media such as MSNBC, the New York Times and CNN), and given the current situation with those, from different parts of society, who tend to support, and politically tail behind, this “mainstream” section of the ruling class, it is possible that the fascists could achieve and consolidate power without a civil war, but with all the terrible consequences that would follow this fascist consolidation of power. Or, as emphasized in the “Declaration and Call,” in what would amount to a one-sidedcivil war, these fascists could carry out a slaughter of those they hate, including Black people and other people of color, “illegal immigrants,” “uppity women” and those who don’t conform to “traditional” sexual and gender relations and “norms.”

In any case, it is a deadly serious reality that these fascists are determined to crush—as violently as necessary—anyone and anything, anywhere in society, that stands in the way of implementing their horrific objectives.

This puts an exclamation point on what the “Declaration and Call” says immediately after this:

This situation needs to be radically changed, to where there are masses of people prepared to defeat these fascists and to do so as part of getting rid of this whole system, which has bred these fascists, along with all the other horrors it continually perpetrates.

The Democrats will never, and can never, fight these fascists in the way they need to be fought, because that requires getting into the real nature of this system, and bringing out the fact that these fascists, as grotesque as they are, are in fact a grotesque expression of the very system that the Democrats themselves are an expression of, and are working to perpetuate. Most fundamentally: The purpose and aim cannot be simply to defeat these fascists, as an end in itself, with the orientation of somehow returning things to the “normal” way this horrific system of capitalism-imperialism has operated for more than a century.

This is not the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, when the goal of those fighting against injustice was to abolish slavery, and—in terms of who ruled society—the only possible positive outcome was the consolidation and strengthening of the rule of the rising capitalist class centered in the North. That time is now long gone. And this system of capitalism, which has developed into a system of worldwide exploitation and oppression, capitalism-imperialism, is long outmoded—long past its expiration date, long past any circumstances where it could play any positive role. The goal now must precisely be getting rid of this whole system of capitalism-imperialism.

The character of a new civil war would have significantly different features from that previous civil war of 1861-65, where one geographic part of the country, the southern Confederacy, attempted to secede and form a separate country in that territory. Today, the forces of fascism among the population are again concentrated in the South, as well as in rural areas throughout the country; but, in the South and throughout the country, they are closely connected, geographically, with sections of the population that are opposed to this fascism. Any new civil war would be fought between opposing forces that would be in close proximity to each other—in a real sense intertwined geographically—around the country. This would have both advantages and disadvantages for the people on the positive side of such a civil war, and this would need to be taken into account in their approach to fighting that civil war.

(The “Red States/Blue States” picture, which is constantly presented in the mainstream media, is very misleading in terms of the geographic and political divisions in the country. It does not present an accurate picture of population concentration—of which sections of the people are actually concentrated where, and in what numbers, within the existing states. Of particular importance, it downplays the concentration of people in this country as a whole in urban areas, including the suburbs around the inner city cores, and the concentration of masses of oppressed people especially in those inner city cores. It downplays the strong opposition to the fascists that exists among large numbers of people in the urban areas. This mainstream presentation of things is meant to reinforce the sense that the only possibility is the continuation of this system of capitalism-imperialism, and the only choice is between the two parties representing the ruling class of this system: the “red” Republican Party or the “blue” Democratic Party. And, by the way, with the color red historically associated with communism, the “appropriation” of this color in association with the fascist Republican Party is an abomination!)

The current polarization, even on the positive side, among those opposed to the fascists, is not what is needed, and will not meet the profound and urgent challenge of these times. For the reasons discussed in this talk, there can be no real and lasting defeat of these fascists on the terms of the Democrats, on the terms of what have been, for generations, the “norms” of “democratic” capitalist rule in this country. Fundamentally, there can be no resolution to this, under this system, which will be in the interests of the masses of people, not just in this country but in the world as a whole. Once more, what is urgently needed is a very different polarization than what exists today—a repolarization—for revolution.

And, once again as well—without being absolute about this—there is a limited time frame within which this repolarization must be achieved. If things continue as they are, with the fascist offensive by the Republican Party and its base becoming even more aggressive and powerful, then it is very likely that their “two-pronged offensive” will succeed, that they will utilize the changes they are forcing through state governments and key parts of the federal government, in particular the courts, to regain and consolidate control of the country as a whole, move forward with a vengeance to implement their fascist program, and forcefully suppress, as violently as necessary, any effective opposition.

The urgency of this situation—and the urgent need for repolarization, for revolution—must be clearly understood, and forcefully conveyed to masses of people. This must be done in a compelling way, without hype (and there is no need for hype to describe the critical situation and urgent stakes). While it is crucially important to unite with people in rising up against the terrible injustices and outrages constantly perpetrated by this system, and to continually bring alive the possibility of a radically different and emancipating alternative, once again it needs to be stressed: It is necessary to wage a tireless struggle to break people out of the ways of thinking, and acting, that in fact keep them chained to this system and contribute to perpetuating this system, in one form or another.

Fatalism, and defeatism—the belief that nothing can be done to change the terrible situation and bleak future humanity is now facing, that no positive radical change is possible—this way of thinking itself must be defeated, overcome both through sharp struggle and by bringing alive and popularizing the possibility for a radically different and better world, through revolution, which is grounded in a scientific, materialist approach to and understanding of the real world and the actual possibility for its positive radical transformation. Overall—and above all in terms of the basic masses, the bitterly oppressed people who must become the backbone of this revolution—overcoming this defeatism, and bringing about the necessary repolarization, must be carried out, and can only be achieved, through a powerful combination of fierce ideological struggle among the people, to win growing numbers to a scientific understanding of the situation we face and the actual solution to this, together with determined resistance against this oppressive system—all of which must be led to contribute to building up the forces and creating the political alignment necessary for revolution.

While masses of people urgently need this revolution, it is all too true that, right now, the great majority of them are thinking in a lot of wrong ways. To put things straight-up, they don’t know shit and have their heads up their asses! This needs to be radically changed—and can be, but only through a tremendous amount of sharp struggle. As I have said before (in “Rare Time”):

It is the responsibility of everyone who recognizes the profound need for revolution—and the rare possibility in a time like this to actually make revolution—to wage a tireless, and at times fierce, struggle to win more and more people to make a radical rupture with the confining and degrading terms of this system, and to take up, and act on, the revolutionary orientation and motivation that is put forward in the “Declaration and Call.”

Instead of “staying in your lane,” and “going for self,” while this system is moving to even more decisively crush any hope for a world worth living in, people need to be looking at the bigger picture, focusing on the greater interests of humanity and the possibility for a far better world—and acting to make this a reality.

Instead of finding excuses to go along with the way things have been, standing apart from (or even bad-mouthing) the revolution, people need to get with this revolution, and not throw away the rare opportunity to be part of bringing something much better into being.

Instead of lashing out with individual acts of frustration, or attempts to take on this system with small, isolated forces that have no chance of succeeding, people need to pour their anger, and their hatred for injustice, into building a movement of millions that could have a real chance to defeat this system and make a real revolution.

Instead of fighting and killing each other, what people need to be doing now is uniting to defend each other—opposing all unjust violence, not launching attacks on anyone but at the same time not allowing the police or “civilian” fascist thugs to wantonly brutalize and murder people. And people need to do this as part of building up the forces for revolution.

Instead of snarking and sniping at each other, and being divided by “identities,” people should be working to unite everyone, from every part of society, who can be united in the fight against oppression and injustice, with the goal of putting an end to this system that is the source of this oppression and injustice.

Instead of being a tail on the Democratic donkey—with its attempt to keep this monstrous system going, and to deal with the growing fascist danger, by relying on the “normal procedures” of this system and doomed efforts to “heal the divisions” that are deepening every day—people need to work for the revolution that is urgently needed, and deal with the fascist danger as part of doing that.

Running through much of the situation today is the problem of individualism—“going for self” regardless of the effect on other people, and on humanity as a whole—which is encouraged and expressed in extreme forms in this particular society at this time, and is often combined and intertwined with a lack of hope for anything better in this world. Again, from Hope For Humanity On A Scientific Basis:

Lack of real hope for a better life in this world is a heavy chain weighing down, suffocating and deeply scarring the masses of humanity, including the youth who are concentrated in the ghettos and barrios of this country as well as its overflowing torture chamber prisons. And the extreme individualism promoted throughout this society, the obsessive focus on “the self,” has reinforced the heavy lid on the sights of people, obscuring their ability to recognize the possibility of a radically different and better world, beyond the narrow and confining limits of this system, with all its very real horrors.

Along with other negative trends, there is the way that people’s sense that the world is fucked up beyond repair, and things are just going to keep going to hell, leads them to just try to get what they can for themselves now, before it’s too late. So people need hope—not hype but real hope that is based on a scientific method and approach to understanding the world as it actually is and the possibility of changing it, in the way it can be changed, to bring a radically different and much better world into being, through a real revolution. They need the scientifically based sweeping vision, and concrete blueprint, for a radically different and emancipating society that is set forth in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have authored.

They need the fundamental approach to understanding reality, and the basis and possibility for radically changing it, that is concentrated in the following:

[T]he systems that characterize the societies that people live in ... are historically evolved. This means that changes in human society are based, and can only be based, on transforming what already exists in that society, on the foundation of the forces of production that have been developed at any given time [the land and raw materials, factories and other production facilities, machinery and other technology, and the people, with their knowledge and abilities].

And even revolutionary changes—a radical leap from one system to another—can only proceed on the basis of transforming what exists. This cannot be done by coming up with ideas or notions about how society “ought” to be, if those ideas or notions have no basis in the existing reality.

What is crucially important to understand is that the basis now exists to enable the billions of people on this planet to have the means for a decent life, worthy of human beings—a life that is continually being enriched, not just materially but socially, intellectually and culturally. But, at the same time, the way human society has developed under the domination of this system of capitalism-imperialism has led to a highly “lopsided” world, where billions of people in the world live in horrific conditions of oppression and misery, with millions of children in the Third World dying each year from starvation and preventable diseases....

It is the productive forces that have been developed under the capitalist-imperialist system that actually provide the material basis to move beyond all this. But, at the same time, it is this system, with its mode of production based on exploitative relations of production, that is the direct barrier to making this a reality—is a chain on the masses of people throughout the world, and on humanity overall.

That is from the article Why The World Is So Messed Up, And What Can Be Done to Radically Change This—A Basic Scientific Understanding. As I pointed out in that article: The resolution to this howling contradiction between what are now the conditions of the masses of humanity, and what is actually possible—the only resolution that is in the interests of those masses, and ultimately all of humanity—is through the revolution to overthrow this system and replace it with a socialist system on the road to a communist world. Bringing this fundamental understanding to people is crucial, in order for them to really have hope, on a scientific foundation.

But the fact is that there is not only a lack of hope among many, but also a lack of searching—for an understanding of why the world is so messed up, and can anything be done to really change this. This needs to be strongly and deeply challenged, through the promotion of broad debate about these literally life and death matters, and a tremendous amount of struggle over the big question: what is the fundamental problem humanity is facing, and what is the solution?—or, put in basic terms, reform vs. revolution, working within this system, or overthrowing it and replacing it with a radically different system. This needs to be vigorously taken up and fiercely debated and struggled out among people in all parts of society—including students, academics and other intellectuals, people in the arts and the professions, as well as people with only a limited formal education—all of whom can be, and need to be, seriously engaged with these vital and urgent questions.

To return to the current lack of searching: this is linked in many cases with self-absorbed individualism, either blindly and blithely oblivious or virulently poisonous. Once more from Hope For Humanity:

Individualism is a significant factor and “unifying element” in much of the negative trends that play a major role in keeping people from recognizing the reality and depth of the horrors continually brought about by this system—and recognizing the urgent need to act, together with others, to abolish and uproot all this, at its very source.

And:

[T]he terrible suffering of the masses of humanity and the urgent challenges facing humanity as a whole as a result of the escalating destruction of the environment by this system of capitalism-imperialism as well as the possibility of nuclear conflagration that continues to loom as an existential threat over humanity—all this cannot be seriously addressed, let alone actually solved, by each person pursuing their particular individual interests, and in fact people acting in this way constitutes a major obstacle to bringing about the necessary solution.

This individualism, in turn, is based, to a very significant extent, in parasitism—living in this country that is sitting atop the imperialist food chain, deriving benefits from the exploitation and misery of millions and billions of people worldwide. This applies not just to the section of people in this country that is really well off, but also to the large number who are scrambling to make it through the day, the week, or the month: for them in particular there is a kind of toxic combination of having to struggle and scrounge to get through, and at the same time benefitting to some degree from imperialist parasitism. The effect of all this is to make it seem possible, and/or to seem necessary, to ignore what is going on in the larger world. But, in reality, there is, and increasingly there will be, no ignoring what is happening in that larger world, and no avoiding the consequences of failing to confront and radically transform this.

Yes, it is true: YOLO. But, since you only live once, you should make it count for something—something much bigger than yourself—being part of an historic revolution to free all oppressed people, and bring in a new day for all humanity, with whole new horizons of freedom and life with meaning for human beings, way beyond what is possible now, when we are still forced to live under this monstrosity of a system which denies a decent life to billions of people on this planet and has no decent future, or no future at all, for those of the younger generations.

Parasitic individualism needs to be directly, sharply, and deeply challenged, as it is a major obstacle in the way of people seeking out the answers to the profound and accelerating crisis and potential catastrophe that people, not just in this country but in the world as a whole, are facing (whether or not they recognize, or acknowledge, it). And this individualism prevents people from acting together, as a revolutionary force, to wrench something positive out of all this ongoing madness.

In both immediate and overall strategic terms, very much bound up with challenging this parasitic individualism is waging substantial, determined, relentless struggle against American chauvinism—the disgusting notion that America and Americans are better and more important than everybody else. As I have pointed out before, this is a poison infecting people broadly in this country, even among the bitterly oppressed; and a positive, revolutionary resolution to the current course of things cannot be brought about unless masses of people break with this American chauvinism. One of the main, and most ugly, manifestations of this American chauvinism is the sickening support, even among large numbers of “progressive” and “woke” people, for the U.S. military—with all this nauseating “thank you for your service”—a “service” which consists of horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity in enforcing the interests and objectives of the most exploitative, oppressive, and destructive social force in the world: U.S. capitalist imperialism. Combating this, and winning people to reject and repudiate this—among all sectors of society—is crucial now, and has definite strategic implications, in building for and then carrying out the revolution that is urgently needed.

So people need to be jolted awake, to reality—to the reality of this system of capitalism-imperialism, the reality of where things are heading right now, with terrible consequences if things continue on this course—and the reality of the possibility, and the urgent need, to wrench something positive out of this, through a real revolution.

Another important dimension of the straight-up, hardcore struggle that needs to be waged with people, including bitterly oppressed people, is spoken to in the following in Part 3 of my New Year’s Statement:

Given the tight connection between militant patriarchy and fascism, it is not surprising that some (though clearly a minority of) Black and Latino men have been drawn to support for Trump, despite his overt white supremacy. (This includes some who are or have been prominent in rap music. While there have been positive forces and elements in rap and Hip Hop overall, what has been increasingly promoted is a culture that is full of, not to say dominated by, misogynistic degradation of women, as well as admiration for the kind of hustler gangsterism that is one of Trump’s defining “qualities.”) It is also not surprising that even significant numbers of women (mainly white women but also some Latina and other women of color) have been drawn to this fascism, as the phenomenon of the oppressed clinging to “tradition’s chains” that oppress them is unfortunately all too common.

There must be determined struggle against the “macho” bullshit of all too many Black and Latino men—a “warrior mentality” of the wrong kind, which also characterizes far too many Native American men, in their own particular way, with their utterly misplaced, and frankly perverse, pride in being part of the same U.S. military that carried out the genocide against these original peoples in America. There must also be sharp struggle against the ways that, among the other half of humanity, which is female, the phenomenon of the oppressed acting in ways that oppress them not only involves clinging to highly oppressive patriarchal religious tradition but also takes the form of aggressively reveling in and flaunting what is objectively highly demeaning “sexualization” and commodification of sex. This is actively promoted among Black and Latina women—and is a definite negative trend in popular culture, including Hip Hop. It is also noteworthy that, as surprising as it might seem when looked at superficially, this self-degrading hyper-sexualization often goes hand-in-hand with its “mirror opposite”: religious obscurantism—a fundamentalist form of religion that blocks, obscures the light of reason. There is also a similar phenomenon among gang members, where gang-banging and other acts of degradation and self-degradation are combined with a heavy religious obscurantism, in one form or another.

To far too great a degree, the “education” that masses of basic people get—and in particular the “education” that tends to “stick”—comes through religious institutions, and the promotion of obscurantist religion. This is a real problem, a significant part of why far too many basic oppressed people are susceptible to anti-scientific thinking, including crazy conspiracy theories.

This “religious impulse” continues to exert a significant influence—is a significant phenomenon—among many in the Black middle class as well, including many who acquire a more “cosmopolitan” education, even at the more “elite” universities.

All this is promoted and reinforced by the continually propagated notion that the very identity of Black people is somehow inextricably bound up with religion and religious institutions, in particular the Christian Black Church (the idea that this religion and Black identity are so tightly and essentially woven together, that they cannot be separated) and that, without religion and the Black Church, Black people could not survive, or thrive, in racist America. But, for the masses of Black people, “thriving” within this monstrous system is impossible—and merely surviving, while still being terribly oppressed, tormented, tortured and repeatedly brutalized and murdered, under this system, cannot be, and is not, the most that can be hoped for, or achieved.

It is true that, although Christianity in particular was imposed on Black people by the slave system, the Black Church has at times, and to a degree, played a positive role in the struggle of Black people; but it is also true that it has placed very definite constraints on this struggle, channeling and limiting it within the confines of this very system that is the source of the oppression and suffering to which Black people have been subjected throughout the history of this country.

As another dimension of this problem, especially with the undermining and outright gutting of public schools, particularly in the inner cities, in the realm of athletics—one of the very few arenas in which a few basic Black people can attain wealth and prestige—there is the fact that significant numbers of Black athletes now go through private Christian fundamentalistschools for their basic “education” (in fact, mis-education). And then, even as they take stands in support of struggles against injustice, many of these athletes also utilize their “platform” to promote the religious obscurantism with which they have been indoctrinated—which contributes to the situation where masses of people, who are influenced by these prominent figures, are vulnerable to all kinds of distortions of reality.

We have witnessed statements and actions by influential Black celebrities, in sports as well as the arts, which reflect and encourage anti-scientific ways of thinking, including disinformation about and discouraging people from getting the vaccines against COVID, when Black people (and other people of color) are dying at higher rates than others from COVID, and the vaccines have been proven safe and very effective against serious illness and death from COVID. This spreading of anti-scientific disinformation is very harmful, both in its immediate effects, and in strategic terms.

Yes, it is true that, in the history of this country, Black people have been the victims of horrific medical experiments, and still today they are subjected to discrimination, and at times uncaring and even harmful treatment, in the realm of health care. And, yes, it is true that Black people have been, and continue to be, subjected to vicious and often murderous oppression at the hands of government authorities. But all that is certainly true of Native Americans as well. Yet they have a much higher rate of vaccination against COVID. What they do not seem to have among them, at least not as a significant factor, is the phenomenon of prominent and influential people spreading anti-scientific disinformation about the vaccines and active discouragement from getting vaccinated.

With regard to vaccines, and dealing with COVID generally, as with all social problems and their solutions, what is needed is an evidence-based scientific approach.

Besides the great harm it does to people who are hit hardest by COVID, and to the overall efforts to “get on top of” this COVID pandemic, another very damaging effect of this anti-scientific, anti-vaccine disinformation is that it plays directly into the hands of the white supremacist fascists, who have been quick to pick up on, praise and promote this. As I have said about this:

What a terrible situation where some Black people and other oppressed people can actually find themselves in the same place as those fascists who regard them as inferior sub-humans and want to deny them basic rights, lock them up permanently, or outright exterminate them!

To a great degree, this spreading of harmful, even deadly disinformation is also an expression of rampant individualism—the notion that “it is my right, and an expression of my personal freedom, to do whatever I want, and no authority should be allowed to restrict that.” As I have also pointed out:

This is nonsense—very harmful nonsense! Individual freedom is not absolute—as almost everyone will agree when this is posed to them in terms that do not run up against their individualism. For example, few will argue that someone should have the freedom to drive 100 miles an hour through a school zone when children are crossing the street. And any reasonable person will agree that it is not okay for white supremacists to lynch Black people—or for the police to wantonly murder Black people—simply because they feel like it—because they see it as an expression of their “individual freedom” (and “personal choice”)....

It would be impossible to live in any society where “individual freedom” (or “personal choice”) were absolute. The question is: Are expressions of individual freedom, or restrictions on individual freedom, good or bad—do they make for a better, or worse, society?

On the part of at least some of these Black celebrities, this irresponsible spreading of anti-scientific nonsense is also part of self-promotion—is an expression of the dominant culture overall, where opinions are “re-branded” as “my truth” and are put forward as being the same as (just as good as, or perhaps even better, than) facts, and people seek to build a following by spouting opinions, including many which are wildly in conflict with reality.

But, again, the influence of religion, and especially crudely anti-scientific obscurantist religion, is also a significant factor in these harmful positions taken by some influential Black celebrities. In the absence of, and especially in opposition to, a scientific approach, people are left groping in the dark, unable to determine what is actually represented by different forces and where different paths will lead. Any rebellion in these circumstances is rebelling blindly, believing that you are striking out against things that oppress you (and others like you), when in fact you are playing into the hands of, and actually strengthening, the most vicious oppressors and ultimately the whole system of oppression.

The religious obscurantism that is far too widespread among the basic masses is another chain of oppression on them, which needs to be vigorously and resolutely struggled against.

And, while it needs to be recognized that there are many religious people who play a positive role in the fight against many injustices and forms of oppression, and it is important to unite with them in this fight, it is also important to struggle against the religious outlook in general. Why? Because putting an end to injustice and oppression, and uprooting the basis for all this, requires a revolution led by a powerful and growing force of people who are grounded in a scientific method and approach, in particular the scientific method and approach of the new communism.

What is said in the book BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian is a fundamental truth—and there is a need to unsparingly drive home this truth: “Oppressed people who are unable or unwilling to confront reality as it actually is, are condemned to remain enslaved and oppressed.” (This is BAsics 4:1.) And the religious outlook and approach—with its misplaced belief in the ultimately decisive role of non-existent supernatural beings and forces—is an obstacle to applying a consistently scientific method to confront reality as it actually is, and transform it in an emancipating way.

To put things in deliberately provocative terms: It’s time to leave that “god stuff” alone—that will never lead anybody to get free. We need a lot less of this “god talk” and a lot more talk, and action, for revolution—real revolution.

Some people may not like my saying all this, but I’m going to say it anyway, because I’m not here to please people, or to make them feel better about their enslaved and degraded position—I’m here to bring them a scientific method and approach to making revolution, in order to free themselves and all humanity, and I’m here to tell them the truth about everything that stands in the way of that.

And one big reason why I say what I say, regardless of whether some people like it or not, is because Black people, who have so long been subjected to the most horrific oppression under this system, can and must play a decisive and tremendously powerful role in bringing about the revolution that will not only put an end to their oppression, but will strike a powerful blow for ending all oppression, of everyone, everywhere. As I have stated before:

There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.

But this can happen only as growing numbers of Black people, together with others, take up a scientific, not a religious, viewpoint, method and approach.

So, am I saying that there is no place in this revolution for people who continue to hold religious beliefs? No. It is an objective fact, which needs to be understood, that many people who take part in this revolution will still hold religious beliefs, of one kind or another—and of course religious people who want to be part of this revolution should be welcomed into the broad ranks of the revolution. The casting off of religious belief by masses of people must be a conscious, voluntary act, which will advance in tempo with the overall development of the revolutionary process and the transformation of society, and the world, toward the goal of ending all oppression and exploitation, all division of society into masters and slaves. But, again, there must be a leading force, and a growing force of the revolution that is solid core/hardcore based on a scientific, not a religious viewpoint, method and approach, and there must be generous-minded but consistent, determined, compelling struggle, waged broadly—sharply posing the need for people to take up the scientific viewpoint, method and approach of the new communism, in opposition to everything that is an obstacle to that, including belief in gods or other supernatural forces which in reality do not exist, and religious tradition which upholds oppressive relations.

Here is another profound truth: Even with all the ways that the heavy chains of hundreds, and thousands, of years of oppressive tradition weigh down on the masses of people—and place a heavy burden particularly on the half of humanity that is female—there is a deep yearning to be free of all this, which not only leads to imaginary hopes of supernatural salvation but also erupts in unrestrained fury right in this real world. And that fury needs to be fully called forth, given a scientific, revolutionary expression—focused toward the emancipation of all the oppressed and exploited of the world, and ultimately all humanity—directed to fighting against the fundamental source of all the suffering: this system of capitalism-imperialism, with its suffocating and brutal, patriarchal male supremacy, along with all its other outrages. This takes on even more powerful meaning and urgent importance in the current situation in this country (and others), where the forceful assertion of raw misogyny (hatred of women) and patriarchal subjugation of women is becoming more blatant and unbridled, focused to a significant degree now in the escalating moves to even further deny women control over their own lives and their very bodies, with the right to abortion, and even birth control, being brought under mounting attack. Right now, this slogan and call needs to be taken up broadly and made a powerful material force: Break the Chains, Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution!

In relation to all this, these observations of mine, from a number of years ago now, not only have great importance in general and at all times, but are especially important now:

The religious fundamentalists, of various kinds, make a point of recruiting in the prisons, and they come with a heavy ideological message.... It is not at all the case that people can only “lose their religion” by replacing it with another religion in some form. But there does have to be another explanation about the world and existence and why this is the way it is, and how it could be different.... If you want to rupture people out of shit, not only stuff that lands them in prison, but the daily shit they are caught up in, in the society, you have to have a really strong hardcore ideological thing to bring to them.... [I]t has to be coherent and systematic. It has to explain the world—and in our case we can actually explain it in a scientific way. That’s an advantage of communism over religion, even though religion has certain short-term advantages.... But we have the advantage of actually being able to make reality make sense for people. That’s a very powerful thing.

We should not underestimate the importance, not only with prisoners but in general, of doing a lot of ideological work to really enable people to see the world in a wholly different way—really the way it is. To take the pieces of this puzzle that are all out of whack and don’t fit together—it’s like looking through a weird kaleidoscope the way most people see reality. And then it’s misinterpreted for them by all these different bourgeois and reactionary ideologies and programs, and so on, including various religious views. But communist ideology and its application to the world is a way of taking reality and having it make sense for people.

At the same time, winning basic people, and in particular the youth, to revolution also requires making further critical breakthroughs in what I have called the “George Jackson question”—the problem sharply posed by George Jackson, a prisoner who became a militant revolutionary associated with the Black Panther Party during the upsurge of the 1960s, and who grappled deeply with the question of revolutionary possibility, before he was assassinated by the authorities. To a slave who does not expect to live beyond tomorrow, Jackson said, the idea of gradual change, and revolution in some far-off future, has no meaning and no appeal.

This takes on particular and special meaning in a rare time like this—a time when revolution could actually be possible, exactly not in some vague far-off future, but through the swirl of the sharpening events and conflicts that are happening right in this present time.

Here, again, is the decisive question of how much the organized forces of revolution are built up and have an impact on all this, in the direction of the revolution that is so urgently needed.

To appeal to masses of people, and in particular basic youth, the revolution must become a growing, organized, disciplined, bold and fearless force which, through its scientifically based method, its sweeping vision, its emancipating program and goals, and its actions, is an increasingly powerful pole that will attract these youth—and fighters for revolution from all parts of society.

There is plenty that needs to be done, and urgently, which requires real boldness and heart, in working for this revolution: powerfully spreading the word about this revolution, challenging people to get into this revolution, recruiting and organizing them into this revolution—going up against and breaking through all the bullshit that people are caught up in that goes against their own real interests—doing the work that needs to be done to transform people’s thinking, and their actions—standing up against the forces oppressing the people, waging the fight that needs to be waged against the atrocities of this system—doing all this to get ready, and to have the basis, to wage the all-out fight to finally overthrow this system, as soon as the necessary conditions for that have been brought into being.

And, as the revolution grows in this way: There is plenty that needs to be done, and urgently, which requires real boldness and heart, to stand up against the fascists, and any other oppressive force, in their moves to threaten and intimidate, brutalize and even murder people. Let me make clear that I am not calling for launching unprovoked and unjustified attacks on anybody; but there is a right, and a need—and there is the responsibility—to defendthe people who are oppressed and brutalized under this system, and those who represent and stand for what is right, and are being attacked because of that.

In the six Points of Attention for the Revolution—which are basic principles that the Revolution Clubs, a key form of organization for this revolution, base themselves on and fight for—the final point is this:

We are going for an actual overthrow of this system and a whole better way beyond the destructive, vicious conflicts of today between the people. Because we are serious, at this stage we do not initiate violence and we oppose all violence against the people and among the people.

Yes, this is something very serious: going for an actual overthrow of this system and a whole better way. And, yes, a big part of this is overcoming how people who are already messed over, in so many ways, by this system, get caught up in yet another way this system messes them up: fighting and killing each other. This needs to stop.

But it doesn’t need to just stop. People who have been caught up in this need to become part of something really positive—they need to become part of the forces for the revolution that is so urgently needed now.

The frustration and anger that so many feel, especially so many basic youth, because they can sense that life under this system has nothing good for them—that, from the time they are born, they are locked down and surrounded by forces that regard and treat them as alien objects of fear and hatred—and that those with power look at them as scum who deserve nothing more than a boot up the ass and a bullet in the brain—this frustration and anger needs to be redirected to fighting the system that treats them this way, and has robbed them, and so many like them throughout the world, of a decent life and a decent future, or any future at all.

Once more, there is plenty that calls, urgently, for great courage and boldness in doing what needs to be done: to be part of rising up against this system and getting ready to go all the way with revolution as soon as the time is right—and, as an important part of that, supporting, and defending, people who are constantly being subjected to unjust attacks on their rights and their very being.

There are the continuing attacks on people and movements that are rebelling against racist oppression.

There are threats against, and physical attacks on, health care officials and providers, local government officials (and their families!), as well as employees in stores, and so on, when they are advocating and implementing much-needed and life-saving measures, such as mask and vaccination mandates to deal with the continuing COVID pandemic. There are attacks on school board members not only for adopting these basic health measures but also for things like approving the teaching of some truth about the white supremacy that has always existed in this country, or allowing rights for trans people.

There are the threats, harassment and attacks on women seeking abortions, and on clinics and medical personnel working to provide those abortions, along with the escalating assault on the right to abortion by the Republican-fascist party, and those it has placed in the courts.

There are brutal and often murderous attacks on LGBT people.

There are continuing moves, including with the threat or use of violence, to once again prevent Black people and other oppressed people from even exercising what are supposed to be basic rights, such as voting. (With a scientific method and approach, it is both possible, and important, to actively oppose attempts to deny people the right to vote, and at the same time win people to see that their efforts need to go, not into voting for representatives of this system that is oppressing them, but working to build up the basis to overthrow this whole system.)

All these attacks on people and their rights need to be powerfully opposed, and people on the good side of this need to be actively protected and defended, where they are assaulted with threats and even outright physical attacks.

There is the need to prevent the police from brutalizing and just coldly murdering people. Let us remember what was said by some people who witnessed, and even recorded, the slow-motion vicious execution of George Floyd: They agonized over whether they should have done more, should have acted to stop this blatant assassination of a defenseless Black man. Now, again, what I am pointing to is consistent with point 6 of the six Points of Attention for the Revolution—and, in what I am saying here, I am not calling for launching an attack on anyone. But there is no right for anyone, including police, to just murder someone—and there is a right and responsibility to defend and protect people from unjust attacks on their rights, and on their very lives.

Imagine if, in these different kinds of situations, there were a force of hardcore revolutionaries, including basic youth, whose presence in a disciplined and organized formation made clear that no unjust attacks on people would be tolerated. But this must not just be imagined—it must be developed as one important part of the overall process of preparing for, and building the organized forces for, revolution.

This must be taken up in a serious, scientific way—not attempting, at any given point, to do what there is not yet the basis to do, but actively working to bring into being the conditions where what was not possible before becomes possible, as the organized ranks of revolution continue to grow and become steeled as a disciplined force. Taken up in this way, this can increasingly have dynamic effect—with “reverberations” and impact far beyond the immediate situation, attracting more people to this revolution... which, in turn, will make it possible to have even greater impact... and attract even larger forces.

All this is an important part of the overall approach that I have laid out in the course of this talk, which will enable what are today the small organized forces of this revolution to continue to grow—increasingly by leaps and bounds—in numbers, organized strength, and impact on society as a whole. This is what more and more people must be challenged, and enabled, to become part of.

This brings up another important dimension of working for revolution—and opposing the fascists as part of doing that: It is necessary to sharply expose and oppose—and fight to politically and practically overcome—the reality that for white supremacists and fascists generally the Second Amendment, the “right to bear arms,” has been regularly upheld and given the backing of the law and the courts, and the support of the police and other institutions of the state; while for Black people, other oppressed people, and generally those opposing the oppression and injustice of this system, the “right to bear arms,” even in self-defense, has been actively opposed and suppressed.

This is made graphically clear in the book by Carol Anderson focusing on the Second Amendment—The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. This book contains (yet more!) searing exposure of the depraved violence visited upon Black people throughout the history of this country, and speaks to how the “right to bear arms” has never applied to Black people, and instead there has been the perverse “right to kill” Black people, on the part of the powers-that-be and racist whites generally. This cannot be allowed to continue!

And it is not just around what is represented by “the Second Amendment” that a determined fight must be waged, but around the many ways in which the approach to rights that are supposedly guaranteed to people is applied in a highly unequal way, so that oppressed people, and those acting against the oppressive relations of this system, constantly find their rights attacked, “abridged,” or outright denied and suppressed. In waging this fight, it is important to recognize and, to the degree possible, take advantage of this contradiction: In reality, under this system of capitalism-imperialism, rights and liberties are determined, and limited, in accordance with what serves the interests of this system and its ruling class; but, we are constantly told that, under this system, there is “liberty and justice for all,” and the rulers of this system, or at least some of them, feel it is important to maintain this myth. Again, to the degree possible, this contradiction must be seized on, in waging the fight to defeat attempts by the enforcers of this system to violate what are supposed to be basic rights, in their moves to suppress people rising up against this system and its profound injustice.

But, most fundamentally, this fight must be waged with full awareness, a scientifically grounded understanding, of the essential nature of this system, with the orientation and goal of working toward the overthrow of this system and the dismantling of its relations and institutions of vicious exploitation and blood-soaked oppression and repression.

Once again, in order to make all this a reality, as this revolution is being brought to growing numbers of basic youth, and others, and they are being challenged to get into it, they need to be struggled with, hard, to get rid of the ways of thinking and acting that keep this system going. People need to “get their head right,” get their head out of their ass, and take up the scientific method and approach of the new communism to understanding reality, and transforming reality in a fundamental way, through revolution. This means not being just out for yourself, or those you can identify with in a narrow way (whoever that may be), but becoming revolutionaries in the fullest sense—revolutionary communists, emancipators of all humanity—becoming part of the organized and disciplined forces for this revolution, and nothing less.

As we say, to “everyone who has the heart to fight for something that is really worth fighting for: You need to be part of this revolution.”

So, on the foundation of everything that has been said so far, and in moving to the conclusion of this talk, it is worthwhile returning to, reviewing, and elaborating briefly on some key aspects of these big questions: Why this is one of those rare times and circumstances when revolution becomes possible, even in a powerful country like this, and how to seize on this rare opportunity to actually make this revolution.

* There is the sharpening conflict at the top, and throughout the country, with society and the “ruling norms” of this system being torn apart, driven especially by the relentless offensive of the fascist forces. Yes, as the “Declaration and Call” makes clear, there are a lot of bad things connected with this, and it could lead to something really terrible; but, if it is seized on and correctly worked on by growing organized forces of revolution, guided by the scientific method and approach of the new communism, it is also possible that we could wrench something really positive out of this—revolution, to put an end to this system and bring something much better into being.

* Bringing into being a revolutionary people in the millions—with an organized force of thousands at the core, leading these millions—is the key objective and necessary focus of revolutionary work now, in preparing to go for all-out revolution, with a real chance to win, as soon as the conditions for that have been brought into being.

And here is another very important requirement in all this. In order for there to be the necessary force of thousands, able to lead millions—and more particularly in order to defeat the vicious repression that is bound to be brought down on a seriously developing revolutionary force, including the ability to replace leaders who are killed or imprisoned by the repressive force of the existing state power:

It is a matter of strategic importance to develop a large core of experienced and tested leaders—not just “tens” but at least hundreds of such leaders, on all levels—firmly grounded in the line, above all the scientific method and approach of [the new communism], and capable, on that basis, of taking initiative to lead, including in situations of sharpening contradictions and the intensification of repression and even attempts at violent suppression by the powers-that-be, throughout the process of advancing the “three prepares” [prepare the ground, prepare the people, prepare the vanguard leadership for revolution]; and then, when the conditions come into being, this core of tested leaders needs to be capable of giving direction to thousands, and in turn millions, to fight all-out, in a unified way, for the seizure of power. Whether or not such a cadre of leaders—in the hundreds, at least—is developed, will have a significant bearing on whether or not all the work we are doing now is really preparing for revolution, and whether there is a real chance of winning when the time comes.

(That is a crucial point I have emphasized in the book The New Communism, Part IV, “The Leadership We Need.”)

This development of hundreds of such leaders must be carried out in the crucible of intense struggle in the tumultuous time before us, as a crucial part of bringing forward the thousands to lead millions. And, as the work of building for revolution is developing, these hundreds, together with the thousands they are leading, must be forged into a disciplined vanguard force, capable of leading the overall revolutionary process of preparing for and then, when the time is right, carrying out the all-out fight for the seizure of power.

* Transforming the people is decisive in order for there to be a positive outcome to all this—and transforming the thinking of masses of people is crucial, is pivotal, in doing this.

* At the same time, there is real importance to fighting the power—building powerful, massive resistance to the continuing atrocities of this system—and actively defending, and opposing moves to intimidate, and attack, those who are targeted by “official” enforcers of this oppressive system and “civilian” fascist forces.

* The key, the most decisive thing: All this must be for revolution: carried out to build toward, and get in position to have a real chance to win, an all-out fight for revolution, as soon as the conditions for that have been brought into being.

Once more: Everything depends on bringing forward a revolutionary people, from among the most bitterly oppressed, and all parts of society, first in the thousands and then in the millions, as a powerful revolutionary force, organized from the start and consistently with a country-wide perspective, impacting all of society and changing the terms of how masses of people see things and how every institution has to respond. Everything must be focused now on actually bringing forward and organizing this revolutionary force.

And then, once this revolutionary force is brought into being, everything would be focused on how to actually fight to win.

At that point, this force of millions would need to be mobilized and wielded in such a way as to make clear that it is going for a complete, revolutionary change—that it will not back down from this goal and accept anything less. In this way, it would constitute a powerful pole attracting and drawing forward even broader numbers of people from all parts of society—and it would pose a definite challenge and call to people everywhere in society, including in all the existing institutions of this system, to come over to the side of this revolution.

And, through the swirl of this intense process, concrete work would need to be carried out to organize, train and prepare the initial fighting forces for the revolution, while actively, vigorously combating and defeating attempts to violently suppress this.

Here, again, is something that is crucial to understand, something that is a hallmark of a serious, scientific approach to fighting to win, when the time comes: No matter how much the situation in society overall is changed, and no matter how much even the most powerful institutions of violent repression of this system are affected by this, with significant splits very likely occurring among them, the revolution will still be confronted with powerful armed forces of counter-revolution, from among sections of the official institutions, along with fascist “civilian forces” aligned with them. And it would be extremely unlikely that, particularly at the beginning phase, the revolutionary fighting forces would be able to confront and defeat those armed forces of counter-revolution by directly and frontally taking on anything close to their full force. That is why, in the doctrine and strategic orientation that has been developed to enable the revolutionary forces to fight to win, when the time is right, it is stressed that:

[T]he revolutionary forces would need to fight only on favorable terms and avoid decisive encounters, which would determine the outcome of the whole thing, until the balance of forces had shifted overwhelmingly in favor of the revolution.

This doctrine and strategic orientation is spoken to in some depth and spelled out more fully in my speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Could Really Make Revolution, with additional thinking provided in my article A Real Revolution—A Real Chance To Win, Further Developing the Strategy for Revolution, both of which can be found at revcom.us. This sets the basic groundwork for how, when the necessary conditions have been brought into being, a revolutionary force, mobilizing masses of people, could actually approach the overthrow of this system in such a way as to effectively neutralize and eventually overcome what would almost certainly be, at the outset, the overwhelming power of the armed forces seeking to defeat and pulverize this attempt at the revolutionary seizure of power. It speaks to how, when the revolutionary situation has been ripened, revolutionary fighting forces, with the backbone drawn especially from youth who have been won hardcore to this revolution, could be organized and trained, and provided with the means to engage and defeat forces of counter-revolution in encounters, beginning on a small scale, which would be favorable for the revolutionary forces—and how, on that basis and through the course of doing that, they could grow in strength and win over growing numbers among those who had been part of the counter-revolutionary forces, and then finally defeat the remaining forces of counter-revolution.

At the same time, the development of this basic doctrine and strategic approach is an ongoing process. And throughout this period of preparing the ground, preparing masses of people and preparing the leading forces for this revolution, this basic doctrine and strategic approach for the all-out fight must be continually developed and made more “operational” in conception—that is, it must be further elaborated and further concretized, particularly in terms of what will constitute the actual pathways to victory—and, flowing from and serving that, what should be the specific nature and features of the encounters with the other side, particularly in the beginning phases, and (as far as possible) overall.

As spoken to earlier, a big factor in regard to all this is the real possibility of civil war between opposing sections of society, and how this could impact the key institutions of state power of this system. If such a civil war were to erupt—or even if the deepening divisions in society were moving more directly toward such a civil war—this could have a profound effect on such institutions, with the real prospect of splits among them, and even the splitting apart of such institutions, with some parts siding with the fascists and others with those on the side opposed to the fascists.

This possibility is something that the basic doctrine and strategic approach for the revolutionary fighting forces would need to take into account and encompass. But, in order for the revolutionary forces to win over, and incorporate into their ranks, significant numbers from among the ruling and repressive institutions of this system, and to do so in a way that would actually maintain the emancipating character of the revolutionary forces, and strengthen them on that basis, it would be necessary for the revolutionary ranks to be tempered and steeled, not just in terms of fighting capacity but in terms of their fundamental ideological and political orientation, as fighters for the emancipation of humanity.

Here again is the very important point that

This is not the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, when the goal of those fighting against injustice was to abolish slavery.... The goal now must precisely be getting rid of this whole system of capitalism-imperialism.... which has bred these fascists, along with all the other horrors it continually perpetrates, here and throughout the world.

So, in the event of, and in the context of, a new civil war, the approach of the revolutionary forces, led by the new communism, would be to carry out the necessary political work, in combination with the actual fighting, to develop such a civil war into a revolution to achieve the goal of getting rid of this whole system, and replacing it with a radically different and emancipating system based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

Above all, right now, this further emphasizes the crucial importance of working actively, boldly and tirelessly for the necessary political repolarization in society as a whole, and among all sectors of society, in a direction favorable for all-the-way revolution.

In this same light, it is also necessary to take into account how a revolution in this country would have important international dimensions and interconnections. First of all, this revolution would of course not be bound by the present territory and borders of this country, which have been forged through wars of conquest and genocide. This revolution will inevitably be influenced by, and will in turn significantly influence, what is happening in countries to the south (and north) of it, with which the USA has historically been closely interconnected, and which in many cases it has dominated and plundered.

And more generally, there will be the ways in which this revolution will be viewed, and responded to, by different forces, far beyond the present borders of this country. A serious fight for revolution in this country—this country—would have the effect of a powerful political earthquake, sending seismic shockwaves throughout the world. It is true that one reaction to this would be that oppressive governments and forces throughout the world would see this as a serious threat to their position and objectives, and there is a real possibility that there could be moves by some of these forces to aid, or join in, attempts to crush such a revolution. At the same time, such a revolution would shake awake and provide a powerful positive shock to literally billions of people everywhere, shattering the sense that no alternative to this terrible world is possible. Overall, it would almost certainly contribute, in a very significant way, to a repolarization on a global scale.

All this would need to be taken into account by the leading forces of this revolution, as an important part of its strategic orientation and objectives.

In all this, and in everything I have spoken to in the course of this talk, this fundamental principle stands out: Revolution is a very serious matter, and it must be approached seriously and in a consistently scientific way.

In Conclusion: Everyone who really wants to see the world changed, in a profoundly positive, emancipating way, and everyone who thinks about whether this is actually possible, or wishes it could be, needs to seriously engage what has been spoken to here, take up the scientific revolutionary orientation, method and approach of the new communism; become part of, and work tirelessly to build up, the organized forces for this revolution whose goal is nothing less than the emancipation of all oppressed people, everywhere, and ultimately all of humanity, from the horrors of this system and from any way in which people are exploited, oppressed, degraded and treated as less than human.

To return to this crucial and urgent truth:

This is one of those rare times and circumstances when revolution becomes possible, not just because this system is always a horror, but because the crisis and deep divisions in society now can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means or radically emancipating revolutionary means.

There is a great challenge that must be met, and a tremendous amount of work and struggle that must be carried out, with scientifically grounded determination and boldness, in order to make possible the emancipating revolutionary resolution.

There is no guarantee of achieving all this, but there is a real possibility. And what we do—what all those who want to see a world and a future worth living in, where human beings everywhere can truly flourish in the fullness of their humanity—what we all do can make a tremendous difference in what the outcome of all this will be.

There is the possibility, there is the challenge.

Dare to become part of the forces for this historic revolution. Dare to work resolutely to make this a reality. Dare to struggle, dare to win.

Listen to and read his most recent social media message: Revolution #141: The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime! and join the mobilization for the Call from RefuseFascism.org, and open to all, for “The Fall of Trump Fascist Regime, November 5, Washington DC.”

We are confronted by—we are now being ruled by—a fascist regime: relentlessly assaulting civil rights and liberties and openly promoting bigotry and inequality; acting with callous disregard or cold-blooded malice toward those they consider inferior and a drain or stain on the country; on a mission to deny health care to millions who will suffer and many who will die without it; crudely degrading women, as objects of plunder, breeders of children without the right to abortion or birth control, subordinate to husbands and men in general; defying the science of climate change, attacking the science of evolution, and repudiating the scientific method overall; a regime brandishing an arsenal of mass destruction and threatening nuclear war; intensifying state terror against Muslims, immigrants and people in the inner cities; unleashing and giving encouragement and support to brutal thugs spewing vile “America First,” white supremacist, male supremacist and anti-LGBT venom—a regime that boasts of all this and declares its intention to do even worse.

This has caused disgust, anger, and agonizing among huge numbers of people, and there have been many important acts of resistance, big and small, to the continuing outrages committed by this regime and its supporters. But the regime remains in power and is determined to ride roughshod over all obstacles to carry out its monstrous agenda; and the need for a massive outpouring of people, acting together nonviolently but with sustained determination, to create a political situation where this regime cannot remain in power—cries out.

The organization Refuse Fascism (RefuseFascism.org) has put forward a call and a plan, and is actively building, for that mass mobilization, to begin on November 4.

So this is the challenge we are facing. To meet this challenge there are big questions that need to be seriously engaged, even as people are moving to build momentum toward November 4.

Donald Trump claims to have won the popular vote in the 2016 election. That is another of his Big Lies. But the fact is: It would have been a disgrace if just 10 people voted for this, or 10 thousand—but tens of millions did. Why? The fundamental answer lies in the whole history of this country and its role in the world.

Did you know that the Constitution adopted by the founders of this country institutionalized the right of men to rape, at will? I had thought of beginning this talk with that statement—and then, in response to the gasps of shock and disbelief that such a statement should call forth, I could have said: No, the Constitution didn’t actually do that, but it did something no less horrific: institutionalizing the enslavement of millions of people. In fact, however, the Constitution adopted by the “founders” did legalize mass rape: Besides enshrining property relations in which men could legally rape their wives, the Constitution, by explicitly codifying the status of slaves as property, in effect established the “right” of the slaveowners to do anything they wished to their slaves, including raping the women. And slave women were raped, regularly and repeatedly, by their owners and overseers.

Often, people who do not want to face the reality and the implications of this will argue: “We have to judge things by the standards of the time—people back then did not know better.” As they say in England: rubbish! For one thing, the slaves knew better! And there is the example of Edward Coles, who before becoming governor of Illinois was private secretary to James Madison (the main author of the U.S. Constitution): Coles freed his own slaves and tried to convince Madison and Thomas Jefferson (author of the Declaration of Independence) to do the same. They refused, but you can’t say nobody knew better back then! It is true—Madison and Jefferson (and, yes, Hamilton!) belong to a past time—and it is long past time that we move beyond what they represent.

The terrible truth is that, with some notable exceptions (including the very significant exception of the generation that came of age in the 1960s), white people overall have either been directly involved in, or have supported or at least passively accepted all this throughout the history of this country. During the whole time of slavery. During the decades of Jim Crow segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror, when repeatedly Black people, in particular Black men, who did not “know their place”—or sometimes without even knowing why, angered some white person—would be lynched, while crowds of white people would gather in a “picnic” atmosphere, vying to get parts of the mutilated body of the Black person hanging from a tree, and photographs of this were turned into postcards that were sold throughout the country. Yes, this is true—the ugly, shameful truth. Today, with the repeated murders of Black people by police, in the rare instances when the murdering cop is indicted, there are white people who sit on juries and refuse to convict. And still too many white people who claim to care about justice, and will take to social media to denounce far less outrageous and sometimes even trivial acts, cannot find it in themselves to be outraged and moved to act about this! If the police wantonly shot down dogs, over and over again, there would be a huge outcry throughout society, including from people who are silent, or make excuses, when this is done to human beings of darker skin.

Now, it would be wrong, and harmful, to ignore the fact that there are white people, in particular younger white people (but others as well), who have taken to the streets to protest these murders by police, and who have put forward the stand: White silence is violence, it is complicity in murder. This is, of course, a good thing—and it needs to happen much more, on a much greater scale. But, given the actual history of this country, down to today, does it really make sense to insist, as some people still stubbornly do, that “fascism couldn’t happen here, not in this country, with our democracy and our great traditions”?!

It is, however, very important to dig into the question: How did things come to this point, where we are confronting the real horror of a fascist America? Here, told briefly, is the “longer story,” the broader history that has led to this.

Thousands of years ago, human beings, who had lived for tens of thousands of years before in small hunting and gathering societies, settled on land and carried out farming and domestication of animals, particularly in the “fertile crescent” of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East areas. With this came the emergence of class division, the polarization between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, including the patriarchal oppression of women by men. As this way of life spread and took hold in large parts of the world, ancient civilizations and empires arose—for example, in India, Egypt, China, Persia, Greece and Rome, and then, centuries later, the Islamic empire, covering a large territory in the Middle East and parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. While built on plunder and oppression, they nevertheless brought forth many great achievements in architecture, art, music, the development of language and literature, science and other spheres. But the history of the rise of empires has also been the history of their decline and fall—because of contradictions and conflicts within them and because of invasions from outside forces, themselves driven by their own contradictions, conflicts and challenges.

This went on for thousands of years. But then, several hundred years ago, something dramatically new emerged: the development of the capitalist system. This is a far more dynamic system than previously existed in human history—a system driven by its own internal contradictions to constantly expand, to continually transform the technological basis on which it operates, to repeatedly intensify the exploitation of people on which its profits rest. And, again as a result of the contradictions and conflicts within and between different countries, and the rise and fall of different powers, it just so happened that it was mainly in Europe that capitalism first took hold and emerged as a dominant force on the world stage. This was accomplished, in its very foundation, through the most horrendous means. Karl Marx, the founder of communism, described, with bitter irony, the “rosy dawn” of capitalism: the massive hunting of slaves in Africa, shipping them in chains, in the millions, to be worked mercilessly in the Americas; the conquest of the original peoples in South America and their enslavement unto death in the gold and silver mines there; and atrocities of a similar kind that fed countless human beings, in far-flung parts of the world, into the relentless machinery of an ever-expanding capitalism. This, as well as brutal exploitation, including child labor, within these capitalist countries themselves, was the basis on which “western civilization” made leaps in its development and became the dominating force in the world, economically, militarily, politically, and culturally.

Capitalism, through all the horrors it has brought about, including two world wars and countless other armed conflicts, has in fact laid the basis for a whole new leap, beyond relations of exploitation and oppression, and the madness of war and environmental destruction; but, at the same time—and this is now posed in very stark and acute terms—this system of capitalism stands as the greatest obstacle to this advance, and human society everywhere is straining against the confines in which capitalism continues to enchain human existence.

This puts in proper perspective and sharply refutes the racist notion of “the superiority of western (that is, white European) civilization” and the idea that somehow capitalism is the highest form of existence that human beings can attain and should aspire to.

And here is the “shorter story,” the more particular reasons why things have come to this crossroads in this country, with potentially disastrous consequences for human beings everywhere.

The USA is a country which established its territory and built the foundation of its wealth through the armed conquest of land, genocide, slavery, and ruthless exploitation of successive waves of immigrants to America. And it has continued as a country marked by white supremacy, patriarchy and male supremacy, and other oppressive divisions, while expanding its domination into an empire stretching across the globe, sitting atop a lopsided world of profound inequalities and plunder of the environment (it would take the resources of nearly 5 earths for the rest of world to have the kind of “consumer society” that exists in the U.S.)—all this backed up and enforced by a massive machinery of death and devastation, the U.S. military, and reinforced with a constant barrage of ideas and culture rationalizing and justifying all this oppression and destruction, propagated through an equally massive machinery of molding public opinion. Today, while the U.S. is, and loudly proclaims itself to be, the world’s number one superpower, it is riddled with sharpening contradictions, and facing growing challenges, within the country and internationally, and this has brought forth a fascist regime that now holds the reins of power, with the finger of a demented bully on the nuclear button—a regime that, without exaggeration, threatens not just greatly heightened suffering for the masses of humanity but the very existence of humanity itself.

So this poses sharply the immediate, urgent challenge we face.

Calling this regime fascist is not an “insult” but speaks to the terrible reality. On the website revcom.us this explanation regularly appears:

“Fascism is the exercise of blatant dictatorship by the bourgeois (capitalist-imperialist) class, ruling through reliance on open terror and violence, trampling on what are supposed to be civil and legal rights, wielding the power of the state, and mobilizing organized groups of fanatical thugs, to commit atrocities against masses of people, particularly groups of people identified as ‘enemies,’ ‘undesirables,’ or ‘dangers to society.’

“At the same time—and this can be seen through studying the examples of Nazi Germany and Italy under Mussolini—while it will likely move quickly to enforce certain repressive measures in consolidating its rule, a fascist regime is also likely to implement its program overall through a series of stages and even attempt at different points to reassure the people, or certain groups among the people, that they will escape the horrors—if they quietly go along and do not protest or resist while others are being terrorized and targeted for repression, deportation, ‘conversion,’ prison, or execution.”

Refuse Fascism has published as a pamphlet, and posted on RefuseFascism.org, material that can be made into portable panels outlining the outrages already committed by the Trump/Pence regime, as well as what they are preparing to do (and what they have called forth from the thugs they have encouraged and unleashed), in their attacks on Muslims, immigrants, civil liberties, women and LGBTQ people, on the environment and on the people of the world, and what they have done to reinforce and fortify white supremacy, police brutality, and mass incarceration. It is very striking how far things have already gone, and how much worse they are bound to get, if this regime is allowed to remain in power and fully implement its agenda.

One of the most distinguishing and significant features of this particularly American version of fascism is the “unholy alliance” between Trump and fundamentalist Christian Fascists. As I pointed out in another recent talk:

“Trump, I think it’s fair to say, could not have won the election if the Christian Fascists ... not only if they had opposed him, but if they’d been unenthusiastic about him ....And ... even when the ... pussy-grabbing thing came out, they didn’t turn against him (...Jerry Falwell, Jr. and all these others)—because they recognized: “Here is somebody who is going outside of the whole rules and the way this is done in the ‘swamp of Washington,’ who will actually carry through on this stuff [like outlawing abortion and suppressing gay people].”... And Trump, for his part, recognized that if he didn’t get this force behind him, he was not going to be able to do it....

“Pence is obviously a critical linchpin in this ... uniting of what’s represented by Trump ... and the Christian Fascists.... [T]he regular bourgeois institutions, ... like CNN, the Democratic Party and so on, ... they keep saying: ‘He can’t do that, that’s not the way things are done.’ But then [Trump] does it, because he’s not playing by those rules. He’s not working within the norms as they’ve been. He is going directly up against them, precisely as an important part of what he’s doing.”

And, while Pence plays a very important role in all this, he is far from the only Christian Fascist in this regime. Besides the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, who is himself a Christian Fascist, to the Supreme Court—re-establishing, after the death of Antonin Scalia, the right-wing majority on the Court—Trump’s cabinet is full of these Christian Fascists.

Perhaps it seems harsh, or even extreme, to refer to these fundamentalist Christians as fascists. Well, in Katherine Stewart’s book The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, she cites these comments by Rich Lang, himself a former Christian fundamentalist, who broke with that and became a liberal Christian pastor:

“When I was born again [Lang recalls], faith was something inside of you, something you were supposed to reflect through your life. But in the 1980s, something happened. Fundamentalist Christianity jumped back into the public square with the intention to reshape the country as a Christian nation as defined by them....

“It’s no different than the Nazis wanting to start with the Hitler Youth. That is where you’d want to start if you were trying to build a fascist movement....

“That’s the word, ‘fascism.’ Nobody likes to use it in this country. But I believe that in this country, underneath the appearances, that is exactly the great temptation of our time. ...[A]nd you have to call it what it is—‘Christian Fascism.’”

Stewart further summarizes Lang’s views this way: “Modern fundamentalism, like fascism in earlier times, he says, involves a strong feeling of persecution, typically at the hands of godless liberals or a religious ‘other’; the belief that one belongs to a pure race or national group that is responsible for past greatness, suffers unjust oppression in the present, and is the rightful ruler of the world; the impulse to submit unquestioningly to absolute authority; and the relentless drive for power and control. It is, he says, a kind of supremacist movement, with religion rather than race at its core.”

And there is this chilling statement by Lang:

“People have no idea it’s going on....

“What does it mean that the conservative church that’s growing in America is an end-times church? What does it mean that we are raising a generation of children to believe that they are the last generation? What is going to happen if we keep on telling them, ‘Don’t care about the environment, and bring on the war, because we’re going to be lifted out of here, and you can forget about loving your neighbors, because they’re just going to get blown away?’”

So, that is the insight of someone very familiar with these Christian Fascists. And the fact is that, in this country, with its whole history of genocide, slavery and racism, any form of fascism, including one basing itself on “Christian supremacy”—any urge to “restore past greatness”—cannot help but be bound together with white supremacy.

The Republican Party has been moving in a fascist direction since the late 1960s, with further leaps since then to becoming more and more openly fascist.

In running for President in 1968, Richard Nixon adopted what has been called the “southern strategy,” which the Republican Party has followed ever since. This is a direct appeal to white supremacy—to the racism of white people, particularly (though not only) in the southern states, who are enraged that Black people are not “staying in their place.”

The Republican Party is not “the Party of Lincoln”—as it sometimes demagogically claims to be—it has become much more the Party of the Confederacy.

With Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party took another leap on the road of fascism. Reagan very deliberately began his campaign for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where in 1964, three civil rights workers were kidnapped and brutally murdered by white supremacists. There, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Reagan proclaimed his support for “states rights,” which, particularly in the South, have long been code words for white supremacist lynch-mobism.

And after George W. Bush took things still further in a fascist direction—including the open use of torture and the active promotion of Christian fundamentalism—the Trump/Pence regime has made the leap into all-out fascism.

There is a direct line from the Confederacy to the fascists of today, and a direct connection between their white supremacy, their open disgust and hatred for LGBT people as well as women, their willful rejection of science and the scientific method, their raw “American First” jingoism and trumpeting of “the superiority of western civilization” and their bellicose wielding of military power, including their expressed willingness and blatant threats to use nuclear weapons, to destroy countries.

The truth—another terrible truth that must be faced—is that, in the context of profound and acute contradictions that are asserting, or re-asserting, themselves in ways that are tearing at the very fabric and deepening cracks in the foundation of this country, at the same time as the American empire is facing serious challenges internationally, fascism is one possible resolution of this, on the terms of this system and its ruling class, even as this is a horror for humanity.

While the Constitution does establish the separation of church and state—and the Christian Fascists are wrong, or simply lying, when they insist that the founding documents of this country established it as a “Christian nation”—the reality is that Christianity has all along been the unofficial state religion of this country, and the country’s identity, throughout its history, has been as a “white Christian nation,” grounded in male supremacy as well as white supremacy and driven by a “manifest destiny” to dominate not only the continent of North America but ultimately the world as a whole. All this has been brought into question, and has become the focus of intense struggle, going back to the 1960s and, in some important ways, back to the Civil War. And while developments internationally, including the demise of the Soviet Union, have given further impetus to the globalization of the capitalist world economy, this very heightened globalization has propelled changes that have sharpened contradictions within the U.S. as well as on the world level, particularly with an emerging capitalist China mounting a challenge to U.S. global economic dominance, at the same time as this heightened globalization, under conditions of western imperialist domination, has wreaked havoc in countries throughout the Third World, including the Middle East (and other places where Islam is the prevailing religion), adding fuel to a virulent Islamic fundamentalism that has declared war on the “decadent West” and on “infidels” and others oriented toward the West and facilitating its imperial domination.

In order to bring about any positive resolution to all this, even short of abolishing and moving beyond this whole system, it is necessary and crucial to break with the “normal routine” and the “normal workings” of the political process.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, recently wrote that, faced as we are with the gravity of the growing climate crisis, those now ruling us may end up destroying civilization because of their willful ignorance and opposition to the scientific method. This was said very seriously, and it is deadly serious. Speaking to this, in “A Question, A Challenge for Paul Krugman, And All Those Concerned About the Future of Humanity,” I emphasized the importance of refusing “to simply hope that the ‘normal workings’ of a process that has brought these people to their ruling position will somehow prevent them from acting in accordance with their ‘willful ignorance,’ and worse.” But why do many people still stubbornly cling to such false hopes?

Thomas Frank is the liberal author of a book with the catchy title What’s the Matter With Kansas?—How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. But the more important question is: What’s the matter with liberals?

Well, it is important, first of all, to draw the distinction between ruling class “liberals” and “regular” liberals. As for “liberals” of the ruling class, what is “the matter” with them is something I will get to shortly. But for those who are not part of the ruling class, the “matter” is that, although they are willing to admit that there are real problems in this country and they would like to have a more just society, and world, many resist recognizing the systematic and systemic nature of the injustices, and they fear the conflict, turmoil and chaos that could be set loose by a determined struggle against this. Even as they do have a sense of the horrors that the Trump/Pence regime represents, too many are caught up in thinking that amounts to this: “I am hoping, and by staying within the established ‘norms’ I am gambling on the hope, that the horrors don’t hit me and those I most care about.” This, it has to be said, is politically as well as morally bankrupt, and will only contribute to the impending disaster. It used to be a common saying: To the person of the Right, order is more important than justice, while for the person of the Left, it is the opposite. Now, the question is put squarely to liberals, and really to everyone: Which, after all, is more important: Order, even if that is the order of fascism, with everything that means? Or justice, even if that means stepping outside of our “comfort zone,” and putting ourselves on the line to prevent this fascism from consolidating its rule and fully implementing its program?

Another dangerous illusion is the notion that, particularly for Black people, what is happening now is just more of the same. Yes, the history of this country is the history of unspeakable atrocities committed against Black people, as well as others—but what we are facing now, with this fascist regime, is the heightened possibility not just that this oppression will be carried to genocidal extremes, and that the masses of people everywhere will be subjected to previously unseen horrors, but that the human species itself will be wiped out.

In confronting and moving to prevent this, one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way, and weighing people down, is American chauvinism—the disgusting notion that America and Americans are better and more important than everybody else. This is a poison infecting people broadly in this country, even among the bitterly oppressed, and there is a great need for people to break with this American chauvinism. Free yourself from the GTF!—the Great Tautological Fallacy. A fallacy: an idea, or a way of thinking, that is false, wrong. A tautology: a round-in-a-circle way of reasoning that asserts something and then claims to prove it by merely asserting the same thing again. So, the Great Tautological Fallacy to which I am referring is the notion that America is a force for good in the world, and therefore whatever it does is good (or at least done with “good intentions”), even if the same thing when done by other forces, especially forces opposed to “us,” is bad, is evil—because... because America is a force for good in the world. Thus, in the grip of the Great Tautological Fallacy, when one is told by the authorities in government and the media, etc., that North Korea developing a small number of nuclear weapons and a few long-range ballistic missiles poses a “grave threat,” one does not question, one does not ask why that is a “grave threat,” while the only country ever to use nuclear weapons, the United States, having thousands of nuclear weapons and the capability to use them, anywhere in the world, is somehow not a grave threat. Under the influence of the Great Tautological Fallacy, one does not stop to think about the fact that, in this situation, North Korea could only be developing this weaponry as an attempt to deter an attack from the United States—for North Korea’s leaders know that if they initiated an attack, they would face massive, overwhelming retaliation—and from the point of view of the imperial rulers of the United States, such a possibility of deterrence is precisely the problem, because it could in some measure limit the ability of the U.S. to dominate and dictate.

Here is another example: Recently, Chelsea Manning, a former solider, who took great risk and spent years in prison for exposing, among other things, war crimes by the U.S. military in Iraq, was extended an invitation to be a lecturer in an academic program at Harvard University. But then, when some government officials and others, including Mike Pompeo, objected and threatened to pull out of the program, Harvard disinvited Manning. Well, who is Mike Pompeo? He is the head of the CIA—an “intelligence” arm of the U.S. government which, without exaggeration, is an instrument of murder on a mass scale. Going back to the 1950s, and through succeeding decades, the CIA has worked through right-wing butchers, in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, and many others, to pull off coups that have removed popular governments from power and replaced them with murderous reactionary dictatorships. More than a million people have been slaughtered as a result of these actions by the CIA. But, through the lens of the Great Tautological Fallacy, the head of the CIA is a respected figure, and his denunciations of Chelsea Manning can cause Manning to be ousted from the program to which she was invited at Harvard.

Of great help in casting off the Great Tautological Fallacy is the “American Crime” series that appears regularly on revcom.us—where you can get a beginning sense of the scope and the depth of the atrocities that have been carried out, here and all over the world, by the rulers of this country, from the beginning and down to today.

But from childhood we are indoctrinated with the notion that America is a shining light of freedom, and the President of the United States is “the leader of the free world.” Well, when has this been true? Was it true during all the years of slavery? Or during the long years of Jim Crow segregation after the Civil War, when thousands of Black people were lynched while leering mobs of white racists celebrated, and Black people as a whole were subjected to constant terror? Is this a shining light of freedom now, when Black people have to take to the streets demanding “Stop Killing Us!” because the police kill a thousand people every year, many of them unarmed, especially Black people, Latinos, and Native Americans? When millions of women are battered and huge numbers are raped every year in this country, is this a shining light to the world? And what is this “free world?” Does it include the countries where the U.S. has backed and armed military juntas and other oppressive dictatorships, with their bloodthirsty death squads terrorizing the people, over the last 100 years and more, throughout Latin America and many other parts of the world? Does it include today countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey—all “allies” of the U.S. and all ruled by brutally repressive governments? Or what about the Philippines, where the government has carried out the cold-blooded murder of more than 10,000 people within the last year, and the head of state, Duterte, openly boasts of this? Does the “free world” include Israel, a nuclear-armed state that has occupied Palestinian land, in flagrant violation of UN resolutions, for 50 years, and forcibly maintains over a million Palestinian people in Gaza in what amounts to an open-air prison, living barely above survival level, and subject to repeated bombardment by Israeli armed forces, which in 2014, with full support from the U.S. government (headed then by Obama), killed over 2,000 people in Gaza, the overwhelming majority civilians, hundreds of them children. Is all this the “free world” of which the U.S. is the leader? Once you remove the blinders of the Great Tautological Fallacy, it can be seen that the “free world” simply means those parts of the world that are under the domination of, or are “friendly” to, the United States, no matter how monstrous their ruling classes may be, while the “non-free world” is made up of those who remain outside of, and especially those who pose opposition or obstacles to, the domination of the U.S. empire.

The U.S. government wages war in Africa and Asia, as well as the Middle East, claiming it is fighting to defend civilization against the brutal and murderous Islamic fundamentalist jihadists. But the imperialists of the U.S. are certainly no less brutal and murderous, and the “civilization” they boast of is literally built on the blood and bones of people all over the world. And why is this Islamic fundamentalism such a force now? Fundamentally because of the workings of capitalist imperialism itself. Besides the overall role of imperialism in creating more favorable soil for these Islamic fundamentalists, actions of the U.S. imperialists have further fed their growth.

In the 1980s, the U.S. actually armed and built up Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists to strike at the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In 2003, in violation of international law, the U.S. invaded Iraq to overthrow the head of government there, Saddam Hussein. This invasion was carried out under the cover of lies that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. This invasion, and the occupation of Iraq by American forces that followed, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, set off bloody conflicts among the Iraqi people and created more fertile ground for Islamic fundamentalist forces.

And the same thing happened in Libya. Under the presidency of Barack Obama, and with the insistent urging of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. intervened in a conflict within Libya on the side of forces opposed to the long-time ruler Muammar Qaddafi. With the fall of Qaddafi—which was brought about mainly as a result of massive bombing of his forces by the U.S. and its allies—the rivalries and conflicts within Libya were intensified, and Islamic fundamentalist forces gained strength.

Or take the case of Iran. In 1953, the CIA engineered a coup that overthrew a popular government that was moving to nationalize the oil of the country, so that it could be used for the development of its economy, instead of being controlled and plundered by the U.S. and Britain. This coup brought the Shah of Iran to power, and the people of Iran suffered decades of torment and torture at the hands of the Shah and his secret police. And, here again, these actions of the U.S. created more favorable ground for the forces of Islamic fundamentalism, which ultimately seized power through the revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979.

These are only a few examples of the American crimes that have been committed, and the kinds of consequences that have followed from these crimes, in countries all over the world. And all this underlines the crucial importance of casting off the blinders of the Great Tautological Fallacy and breaking with American chauvinism. We need to think about humanity, first and above all.

During the 1960s, a whole generation (or a large and defining part of that generation) broke with American chauvinism, cast off the Great Tautological Fallacy and, at the cost of real sacrifice, dared to stand up against the atrocities committed, here and throughout the world, by the rulers of this country, and fight for a better world. Unfortunately, all too many (though not all!) of that generation have become disoriented and have allowed themselves to become, as the French say, “récupérer”—that is, they have come back under the wing of the ruling class, in particular its “liberal” representatives in the Democratic Party, and have far too much accepted things on the terms of a system they once, very rightly, recognized as viciously criminal. But now, when the workings of this system have brought this fascist regime to power, there is, more than ever, a profound and urgent need for people, of all generations, to finally and thoroughly break with American chauvinism, and act in the interests of humanity.

Here is another important statement that can be found on revcom.us:

“The Democrats, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., are seeking to resolve the crisis with the Trump presidency on the terms of this system, and in the interests of the ruling class of this system, which they represent. We, the masses of people, must go all out, and mobilize ourselves in the millions, to resolve this in our interests, in the interests of humanity, which are fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the ruling class.”

Why is it that the Democrats can only try to resolve this on the terms of the system—and for that reason cannot offer any alternative that is in our interests, in the interests of humanity?

Why are they determined to keep things within the “established norms” and “acceptable limits.”

We can turn to the words of Barack Obama, shortly after Trump won the electoral college vote. We, Democrats and Republicans, are on the same team, Obama insisted. And he made a point of saying that we should wish Trump well and help him succeed because his success is success for all of us. Well, we can say that here Obama was telling an important truth—ultimately and fundamentally they are all on the same team—which explains why the Democratic Party will only oppose what the Trump/Pence regime is doing within narrow limits, and always in the interests of the “team” of which they are all a part. And, really, we should all help Trump succeed with his fascist agenda, because a “successful” fascism will be good for all of us? Only with the perverted logic of the system all these politicians serve, and with the poisonous outlook of American chauvinism, could anyone put forward such a position!

Like the Republicans, the Democrats believe in the superiority of the capitalist system of exploitation and the “exceptional greatness” of America and its empire.

They champion a brave new world of “21st century globalization,” which rests on a vast network of sweatshops where people, including children, slave long hours for near-starvation wages.

They firmly believe in the right of America to dominate the world—and to overturn governments, bomb countries and slaughter people to do so—but they say it should be done with the cooperation of allies and in the name of “making the world more free, orderly and peaceful.”

They will talk about “diversity” and “inclusiveness” while actually acting to maintain the fundamental relations of inequality and oppression that are hallmarks of this country, because those relations are built into this system and it could not exist or function without them.

In short, even with their real differences with the Republicans, they represent and serve the same system—the system whose “normal workings” have now brought fascists to power.

It will only make things worse, and work against what needs to be done to put an end to this nightmare, if people are taken in when Trump appears, for a moment, to be “more reasonable” and is praised by his ruling class opponents for being “more presidential,” or when they treat him as a miserably failing clown, or an egomaniac with no ideology or program, while he forges ahead with his fascist agenda. Hitler, too, while perpetrating monstrous atrocities, and preparing to do even worse, became skilled at “normalizing” this at each step and at times “toned down” his rhetoric. This fed illusions that too many wanted desperately to cling to.

Upon coming to power, Hitler moved to crush the communists, because of his deep hatred for communism and because the communists were the most powerful organized opposition to the Nazis. Early in the Nazi regime’s rule, the Reichstag (German parliament building) was burned down and, although there are indications that the Nazis themselves were responsible for this, they blamed the communists, and seized on this situation to round up communists and declare emergency measures eliminating or severely restricting rights and liberties, measures which they moved to make permanent. A group of communists was charged with burning down the Reichstag—but the trial actually resulted in the acquittal of most of them, including the prominent communist Georgi Dimitrov. Many people wanted to believe: If communists are acquitted in court proceedings in these circumstances, surely that shows that the “separation of powers” and the remaining institutions of democracy can still “work” to contain and restrain Hitler. These kinds of illusions fed political paralysis and undermined the kind of massive resistance that might have ousted the Nazis from power, before they were able to force the reorganization of society in line with their barbaric outlook and aims, and go on to commit atrocities on a scale few would have thought possible when the Nazis first came to power.

So, it is crucial to correctly understand, and respond to, the maneuvers of the fascist regime in power now in this country and the conflicts among the powers-that-be. As the statement on revcom.us, about why the “liberal” section of the ruling class cannot resolve this crisis in our interests, goes on to say:

“This, of course, does not mean that the struggle among the powers-that-be is irrelevant or unimportant; rather, the way to understand and approach this ... is in terms of how it relates to, and what openings it can provide for, ‘the struggle from below’—for the mobilization of masses of people around the demand that the whole regime must go, because of its fascist nature and what the stakes are for humanity.”

This brings us again to Refuse Fascism and November 4. As the publication from Refuse Fascism, “NOV. 4—IT BEGINS” explains:

“RefuseFascism.org is a movement of people coming from diverse perspectives, united in our recognition that the Trump/Pence regime poses a catastrophic danger to humanity and the planet and that it is our responsibility to drive them from power. This means working and organizing with all our creativity and determination toward Nov. 4 when many thousands of people will fill the streets of cities and towns, beginning a struggle that must continue day after day and night after night, eventually involving millions of people, demanding: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!”

As I also emphasized in the “Paul Krugman” article:

“People who hold many divergent points of view must come together and act politically, in what is really a meaningful and powerful way, to deal with the looming—in fact the ongoing—disaster embodied in this Trump/Pence regime, because of its willful opposition to the scientific method and its utter disregard for and repeated trampling on the truth, because of its overt white supremacy and misogyny, its xenophobic and bigoted attacks on immigrants, Muslims and LGBT people, its raw ‘America First’ jingoism and the grave danger it poses to human existence through its predatory approach to the environment and bellicose wielding of military power, including its expressed willingness and brazen threats to use nuclear weapons.”

Many people who deeply hate everything Trump is about, have nonetheless raised: If we drive out Trump, then we’ll just get Pence, and if anything he is even worse. But that reflects still too much being confined within, and weighed down by, the “normal way” of doing things, which is precisely the trap that people have to break out of in their millions and millions. It is a matter of driving out the whole Trump/Pence regime through massive and sustained political mobilization and resistance from below, changing the whole political landscape, the whole political situation, culture and atmosphere in society. If, and as, this begins to happen on the scale and with the determination that is needed, this, in turn, will have significant repercussions among the ruling political forces, creating or deepening cracks and divisions among them and forcing at least sections of the “liberal” ruling class forces to pretend to recognize the legitimacy of what this mass mobilization is demanding, while at the same time seeking to co-opt it and bring it back within the normal and “acceptable” channels and positions. This, in turn, must be responded to by seizing on the further openings that are created by all this, to draw even greater numbers of people into massive and sustained mobilization. And this overall dynamic must be continued, amplified and accelerated toward the goal of actually driving out this regime before it can fully consolidate its rule and implement its program.

Thousands must be organized to take to the streets in cities all over the country, beginning on November 4, overcoming fear and feeling the strength of their common cause and action, and their common aspiration and determination, making clear their resolve to not just make a statement but to continue—and, more than that, to spread and multiply their numbers and impact—until millions have been mobilized and refuse to stop until the demand has been met: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! Preparations must be made, logistically as well as politically, so that this mobilization can be sustained and can continue to expand and gain strength, so that the spirit, the determination and courage of those involved can be lifted and reinforced, while growing numbers of people, from broad and diverse sections of society, can be involved and can provide support and assistance. This is the great cause and the great movement to which all those who REFUSE to accept a fascist America must apply their energy and creativity to make a reality, now and moving forward to November 4, and beyond.

A Better World IS Possible!

In the most fundamental sense, only a thorough transformation of society, through a revolution to break the hold of this system and bring into being a completely different economic and political system, geared to meeting the needs of the people, for basic necessities and for a stimulating and inspiring intellectual and cultural life, seeking the truth through scientific means and giving flight to creativity and imagination, with new relations among people that do away with all oppressive divisions—only this can bring an end to the unnecessary suffering that is continually inflicted on the masses of humanity and make possible a world where human beings can truly flourish.

Going back to the foundation of this country and the decisive role that slavery played in its rise as a capitalist power, and reflecting on the historical development of not just this country but human society more broadly, I have pointed to this profound reality:

“There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.”

Within the framework and limits of this talk, it is not my purpose, nor is it possible, to go deeply into the analysis of why this system cannot be reformed but must be abolished through revolution. I have done this in the book The New Communism, which not only speaks to why a revolution is necessary but also what the character of that revolution must be, and how that revolution could actually be brought about, even up against the tremendous power of the existing oppressive system.

And in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America a sweeping, and at the same time concrete, vision and plan for a radically different society and world is laid out, embodying a whole new dimension of freedom and whole new relations, among people and between people and the environment, beyond the narrow confines and the terrible consequences of the present system of exploitation and plunder.

But, whether we consider ourselves revolutionaries, convinced of the need for a radical overturning of the system and thorough transformation of society, or we believe that it is possible to bring about changes that will lead to a more just society within this system; whether our understanding is that America is not, and cannot be, a force for good in the world, or we hope it still can become that—all of us need to come together, and act together, with the urgency that corresponds to the terrible present and the gravely imperiled future that this fascist regime represents for humanity, and with the conviction that something far better is necessary and possible.

We may have differences about what that “something far better” is, and how it can be brought about—and we should continue to discuss and debate this, with the orientation of seeking the truth, whether convenient or inconvenient, comfortable or uncomfortable, and following the truth wherever it leads—but it is not only possible but crucial and urgent that we unite—and actively go forward to win truly massive numbers of people—to act, in a really meaningful way, to bring about the removal of this fascist regime before it can fully consolidate its rule and bring down the full effect of its horrific agenda. In the “Paul Krugman” article, I put it this way:

“Krugman is a proponent of capitalism, whereas I am an advocate of communism, a new communism, who is convinced that what is ultimately and fundamentally required to deal with the current horrors facing the masses of humanity, and the looming threat to the very existence of humanity, is a truly radical and emancipating revolution. But that is not the immediate question and challenge before all of us at this present moment. Rather, it is to deal with the grave danger posed by those now in power, through nonviolent but massive and sustained political action—the mobilization of first thousands, growing into millions, determined to get and remain in the streets until this regime is removed from power. Does not the common recognition that this regime ‘may end up destroying civilization,’ demand of us—of all those, of many divergent viewpoints, who can recognize that these are the stakes for humanity—that we act together, and do everything in our power, to bring about the massive political manifestation that is urgently needed to drive out this regime?”

And, in concluding, let me go back to what I wrote at the end of that article:

“to act, from their own perspective, to give meaningful support to, and indeed to become actively involved in, the critical work building toward November 4: publicly endorsing and promoting the Call from Refuse Fascism, helping to break through what is effectively a white-out of this by the mainstream media, donating and raising funds, directing people to the RefuseFascism.org website, and in countless other ways helping to develop the necessary political and organizational basis for what Refuse Fascism very rightly calls ‘this great cause.’ For it is the massive and sustained political mobilization called for by Refuse Fascism that truly represents the prospect of forging a positive path through and beyond this extremely dangerous and potentially disastrous situation.”

The Time Is Urgently Upon Us Now—To Drive Out The Trump Fascist Regime!

This is Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION—number 141.

Over the past 30 years, I have analyzed how the Republican Party has been moving in a fascist direction since the 1960s, with further leaps since then to becoming more and more openly fascist. And now, with the “second coming” of the Trump regime, this fascism is on an unrestrained rampage.

It would have been far better—we would very possibly not be faced with the terrible situation we are now forced to confront—if this analysis, sounding the alarm about very real fascism, had not been so often ignored, or met with stubborn resistance and cheap accusations of being dishonestly “alarmist.” In a number of critical situations over the past decades, those of us who have recognized this developing fascism for what it is, have called for massive mobilization to defeat it—but, although some responded to this call, the millions who should have taken it up did not do so. So, now, here we are. And, while we should not “live” in the past, we definitely should learn from it.

Every day this is driven home more and more forcefully and cruelly: There is no living with this Trump/MAGA fascism—it must be removed from power before it commits even more horrific atrocities and forcibly shuts down any real possibility of resistance.

The profound question with which all decent people are now confronted is: Will we rise together, in the millions, to do what urgently needs to be done, to drive out this Trump fascist regime that is a truly terrible scourge on humanity and a very serious threat to humanity’s future?

This means actively resisting—massively defying and demanding that all institutions refuse to comply with—the dictates of this fascist regime. It means rallying in even greater numbers than before on October 18 in the “No Kings 2.0” demonstrations around the country. And, most crucially, it means actively taking up the Call initiated by RefuseFascism.org, and open to all:

“The Time has come for...THE FALL of the TRUMP FASCIST REGIME, Beginning November 5, 2025, Washington DC.” The Call continues:

“Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now. Humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for future and rigged elections. We must drive the Trump Fascist Regime from power.

“Beginning November 5, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election, flood DC in nonviolent protest. Surround the White House. Surround the Capitol. Surround the illegitimate fascist-packed Supreme Court. Come back again and again. Across the country, refuse to comply. Every person of conscience, millions of us together, grind the machinery of the fascist regime to a halt.

“Don’t stop until Trump is removed.”

Why DC? Because that is the seat of government—it is where the power of this fascist regime is concentrated, and where it can be impacted by masses of people in the most concentrated and powerful way.

In a number of messages—including the previous one (number 140)—I have spoken to the basic means through which this regime could actually be driven from power: the decent people, in the millions and tens of millions, who deep in their hearts abhor this fascism, must seize the initiative themselves, rising with nonviolent but powerful determination to reset the terms, creating a massive “political earthquake from below,” bringing about a profound political crisis such that the completely illegitimate nature of the Trump fascist regime stands out all the more sharply, provoking and motivating major shifts and realignments throughout society, including within the dominant and ruling institutions, such that this regime can no longer function and cannot remain in power.

There are many people and forces within the ruling institutions—or with strong ties and potentially important influence within those institutions—who are very deeply troubled by, or even strongly opposed to, how they see the actions of the Trump fascist regime “violating the Constitution and the law, destroying our great American experiment in democracy” and “seriously undermining and damaging our country’s standing in the world.” As a revolutionary communist who has developed the new communism as a whole new framework for human emancipation, I have a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of the system that rules in this country and its role in the world; but, at the same time, I have a clear sense of the very real difference it makes, in a profoundly terrible way, when there is not even a pretense of democracy and basic rights are openly trampled on. In light of the urgent need to defeat and remove the Trump regime that is enforcing an undisguised fascist dictatorship, and the crucial importance of uniting all who can be united to drive out this regime, I recognize the particularly important role that such people and forces, with ties and influence in key institutions, could play in regard to this urgent need. I also recognize that they will only feel both compelled and enabled to play this role if there is, in fact, the kind of “massive political earthquake from below,” that can be brought about by millions taking up the Call from Refuse Fascism, and in this way moving to create the kind of political crisis where this “political earthquake from below,” in combination with heightening divisions within the dominant and ruling institutions, could lead to the removal of the Trump fascist regime.

Finally, I want to speak directly to this: While there is a real possibility that this powerful combination could actually succeed in creating the conditions where the Trump fascist regime is removed from power, there is no “guarantee” that this will succeed. But there are times and circumstances when—even as the challenge is daunting and the chances of success are uncertain and may seem unlikely—going up against powerful forces of oppression is necessary and a far better course of action than failing to do so. This is one of those times and circumstances.

If the Call from Refuse Fascism—to flood DC with the nonviolent protest of millions, beginning November 5—had not been made, if work to make this a reality were not being carried out, then any possibility of actually defeating and removing this fascist regime would be effectively shut down, and very soon. The profound reality is this: The massive mobilization called for by Refuse Fascism, and open to all, represents the real possibility—the ONLY real possibility—of actually driving out this fascist regime, and putting an end to the endless horrors it is determined to perpetrate.

Yes, the Trump regime might seize on the mobilization for November 5 as an excuse to bring down further repression. But this regime has already brutally demonstrated that it intends to viciously persecute those it chooses to identify as “enemies,” and to relentlessly repress any actual or potential forces of opposition, within the ruling class itself as well as in the larger society, whether or not they actively resist the regime.

In the circumstances we are now facing, failing to even try to drive out this fascist regime, while there is still a possibility of succeeding, would be far worse than failing in the attempt to drive out the regime. As the Call from Refuse Fascism plainly and sharply puts it: “If we fail to even try, future generations—if they exist—will never forgive us.”

But we may not fail! As dramatically demonstrated by the accelerating juggernaut of the Trump fascist regime—and, on the other side, by the continuing protests and repeated massive rallies and marches against this fascist horror—these are not “normal times.” In these extraordinary times, things can change very rapidly, on a huge scale and with major impact. That can apply not only in very negative but also very positive ways: the repeated outpourings against this regime can be built on and then given the most powerful expression in the mobilization and convergence on DC, November 5, being called for by Refuse Fascism, with an open invitation to all who are outraged by Trump/MAGA fascism.

If this succeeds, it will be a truly historic achievement for humanity now, and something that will contribute in a profound way to the possibility for a far better world for future generations.

And again, if millions are rallied to this Call for a massive, nonviolent but determined mobilization and convergence on Washington DC, November 5—there is a real possibility that this could succeed.

Black People Should Be Among The Front Ranks In The Fight To Defeat Trump/MAGA Fascism

A playlist of social media messages from Bob Avakian

REVOLUTION 116: Black People Should Be Among the Front Ranks in the Fight to Defeat Trump/MAGA Fascism

REVOLUTION #127: Trump/MAGA fascists demand a pardon for the racist cop who carried out the blatant and depraved murder of George Floyd!

REVOLUTION #128: Stephen A. Smith: an obnoxious poser bloviating misinformation and sucking up to fascists.

REVOLUTION #139: Yet more genocidal racism from Donald Trump!

REVOLUTION #140: Blatant racism and undisguised fascism are openly and officially celebrated—and people opposing this are threatened, attacked, hounded and sacked!