REVOLUTION 72

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the rest: We don’t need your “promise of America”—we need a revolution to put an end to your system

BOB AVAKIAN—REVOLUTION

Number Seventy-Two. Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the rest: We don’t need your “promise of America”—we need a revolution to put an end to your system.

With her newly-named “vice presidential running mate,” Tim Walz, Kamala Harris is going around the country trying to get people hyped up about “the promise of America.” And there is all this talk about the great vision of the “founders” of this country.

But what is “the promise of America,” and who were the “founders?”

As shown by what this country has actually done, here and all over the world, from the time of its founding down to today, the real “promise” of America is that it will enslave, exploit, oppress, discriminate against, degrade, plunder and massively destroy people and the environment.

That is the actual truth—it is a big part of the truth they don’t want people to know—truth they constantly lie about and cover up.

As for the “vision” of the “founders” of this country, there is this striking fact: In the Capitol building in Washington D.C., there is a painting celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, which declared that “all men” (all men) “are created equal.” Of the 47 men shown in the painting, the great majority are slave-owners. That includes Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Four of the five first presidents of this country were slave-owners—including George Washington (“the Father of the Country”) as well as Jefferson and James Madison, the main author of the U.S. Constitution.

In the time since then, after the Civil War, slavery was replaced by “Jim Crow” segregation, and Ku Klux Klan terror—which, after World War 2 was followed by continued segregation, discrimination, and racist terror by police, who since 1960 have killed more Black people than the thousands who were lynched during the whole time of open segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror. This is a country actually defined by its discrimination against and brutal, murderous oppression of Black people, Latinos, and Native Americans, and other people of color, throughout the history of this country, and down to today.

And, as I pointed out in message number Three:

The USA is a country in which a woman is assaulted/beaten every 9 seconds. It is country where huge numbers of women are raped and otherwise sexually assaulted every year; a country where the right to abortion has been ripped away from women, enforcing male supremacist control over their bodies, and their very being—in a very real sense a form of female enslavement. This is a country in which LGBT people are discriminated against, persecuted, bullied, vilified and abused, brutalized and outright murdered.

This is a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—in which more than 40 million women are enslaved in international sex trafficking and the so called “sex industry”; where, especially in the poorer countries dominated by imperialist powers, hundreds of millions of women are cruelly exploited as a key part of the “supply chains” of the world economy and the overall capitalist-imperialist system, in which the U.S. has for decades been the dominant power.

While peddling their perversion about “the promise of America,” Harris, Walz and the rest try to excuse away the real history and actual reality of this country by talking about how they are working to bring about “a more perfect union.” But what they are really working to “perfect” is more parasitism—more vicious exploitation and oppression—with the especially cruel exploitation of masses of people around the world, including more than 150 million children.

All that is the foundation for the system of capitalism-imperialism that rules in this country and dominates the world.

We don’t need any more of their “promise of America” or their “perfecting” parasitic exploitation and murderous oppression, with its massive destruction of people and the environment.

This is 2024, not 1776. We don’t need to be claiming the tradition and building on the basis of the revolution of 1776 that established a republic that has been built on slavery and capitalist exploitation. We need a revolution to abolish and move beyond all that. That is the real promise of a future worth living in, for the masses of people in this country and throughout the world: a revolution whose fundamental aim is the emancipation of humanity from every form of slavery—every way in which one part of humanity is used and abused by others. Where humanity as a whole can truly thrive and finally be fit caretakers of the earth.

And, as I have shown in these messages, this revolution is possible in this time we are living in, now.