REVOLUTION 84

The capitalist system today is a system of international exploitation: capitalism-imperialism

The capitalist system today is a system of international exploitation: capitalism-imperialism.

This is Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION—number Eighty-Four.

The dominant capitalist system today rests on, and could not exist or function without, the cruel exploitation of literally billions of people throughout the world—and especially the vicious super-exploitation of people in the Third World (Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia), including more than 150 million children—forced to work in slave-like conditions in sweatshop factories, mines and farms.

The totally unnecessary, but very real, horrors that people experience everyday are grounded in, and built into, this system of capitalism-imperialism. The answer to this is not striving for “more” or “more perfect” democracy under this system—for, as I have shown in the previous messages, such a “democracy” can only serve this very system that is the fundamental cause of all these horrors.

As I explained in message number Seventy-Six:

This system forces the people who rise to the top of it, and rule it, to be literally—without any exaggeration—cut-throat exploiters, murderous oppressors on a massive scale, and relentless plunderers of people and the environment, regardless of the suffering this causes for masses of human beings. For individual capitalists, and for the ruling classes of capitalist countries, if they do not beat out and beat down others, by whatever means, no matter how monstrous, they will go under. This cannot be “reformed away,” and it cannot be changed by changing the people who rule in this system—they will all be bound by the very nature, the “logic” and dynamics, and the demands of this system.

But there is a way out of all this madness—a revolution to overthrow this system. A revolution to abolish and uproot the exploitation on which this system rests and depends, together with all the oppressive relations that go along with this exploitation, as well as the culture that rationalizes and justifies (even glorifies) all this oppression and exploitation. A revolution to replace this system of horrors with a socialist system that actually empowers and inspires the masses of people to move beyond all this madness, aiming for a communist world where these oppressive divisions and conflicts among human beings—based on class, race, sex and gender, and on nationality and country—will have been overcome and surpassed.

All this is spelled out concretely, and sweepingly, in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have authored.

What is more, as I have gone into specifically in messages Eight through Eleven, and returned to throughout these messages overall, this is a rare time when the divisions in this country—and especially the divisions among the ruling capitalist class and its political representatives—are deep, acute and continually sharpening, so that the “normal way” they have held society together under their domination, as a “unified” ruling class, is being ripped apart and can no longer hold in the way it has for generations. And there is this crucial, liberating, conclusion:

This is not a time to be siding with one group of oppressors or another. This is a rare time—a very rare opening—a chance that may come only once in a lifetime—a chance to take advantage of the deep divisions among the ruling oppressors and go after their whole system, with the aim of bringing the whole thing down, and putting something much better in its place.