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An Open Letter from Sunsara Taylor and a Team of Revcoms, January 2024

Students, Faculty, Administrators, and Everyone with a Conscience

We challenge you to dedicate this decisive year—and your life—to learning about, fighting for, and getting organized for revolution, the only way to wrench out an emancipatory future for humanity.

If this sounds like a “big ask,” it is!

If this sounds like “too much,” then you really don’t understand what we are confronting—what time it is and what is possible now.

Either way, you need to keep reading…

THE WORLD IS BEING RADICALLY CHANGED

WHAT YOU DO—OR FAIL TO DO—CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE

History is marked by extended periods of seemingly gradual change, punctuated by bursts of turbulence and turning points that radically alter world history. The old order unravels and is shredded apart. Often, with world wars and actual revolutions.

We are living through one of these times. Humanity’s future hangs in the balance.

Genocide rains down on Palestine with the full backing of your government. More than twenty-three thousand slaughtered. Starvation, disease, and winter’s cold stalk the living.

This system’s wars spread, while its daily workings crush lives and destroy spirits worldwide.

This system confronts humanity with existential threats: nuclear war and global warming. Oil and gas fuel world economies, and “green energy” is prey to the dictates of profit and other driving imperatives of this system of capitalism-imperialism.

Capitalism-imperialism is a global system rooted in and enforcing exploitative economic relations, oppressive social and political relations, the domination of whole nations, peoples and genders – and outmoded ideas and morality that corresponds to all this. This system cannot be reformed. It must be overthrown.

“We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.” – Bob Avakian

Here, in the U.S., polarization and divides are unbridgeable. The center barely holds, with the rulers—Democrats and Republicans—at each other’s throats.

Liberal democratic norms shredded. “Respected” ruling institutions like the Supreme Court losing legitimacy. Others, like Congress, a fascist farce. Hallowed notions of striving for a “more perfect union” appear delusional, replaced by talk of a coming civil war.

Campuses themselves are divided. Righteous protests against U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza sting the oppressors and inspire the world. Fascist witch hunts along with reactionary billionaire alumni vilify students and topple university presidents, equating righteous anti-Zionism with poisonous anti-Semitism. The fascists’ big “prize” being the Black “scalp” of Harvard’s Claudine Gay for alleged “plagiarism,” fueling MAGA white-supremacist rage and anti-intellectual revenge.

Everywhere, violent MAGA fascists rampage with mounting initiative, fighting to impose open white supremacy, anti-immigrant xenophobia, the Christian fundamentalist theocratic enslavement of women, and anti-LGBTQ terror. Basic rights like abortion obliterated. MAGA fascists seek to lock in their nightmare vision, whether through “legitimately” winning the 2024 election, if there is one, or through extralegal violence. 

“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.” – Bob Avakian

What To Do:

 Watch The Bob Avakian Interviews.

 Watch The RNL—Revolution. Nothing Less!—Show

Read the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, and more.

Follow Bob Avakian on social media:

Sin up to learn more about and start organizing for this revolution or contact therevcoms@gmail.com.

Resources coming soon.

Changing This Reality in a Positive Way Means Making Revolution

And here is something that most people do not see, but which Bob Avakian has analyzed: This ugly and dangerous reality also holds heightened possibility for a REAL REVOLUTION.

The increasingly antagonistic ruling class rifts, the social unraveling and ripping up of cohering norms, and deep divides rooted in the ugly history of this country cannot be resolved within the framework that has held this country together since shortly after the Civil War. Two countries in one cannot continue indefinitely! For all these reasons, we are in a rare time when the possibility of making a real, emancipating revolution is heightened!

When slave masters fight, there is a much greater opening for the slaves to bust through for liberation!

This is not the time to settle for election tropes like “lesser of two evils,” or to desperately fight to preserve what has been. NO! What is needed is to bring the whole monstrous edifice down, to overthrow the entire system of capitalism-imperialism that both the war criminal Democrats and the fascist Republicans represent. This is our moment, the millions and millions of this system’s captives and subjects—the bitterly oppressed and all who are repulsed by the current order—for a shot at a whole better way to live.

We, the Revcoms, Are Here to Recruit You as Early Initiators for This Revolution

This choice is for now, with the 2024 election season shaping up to be pivotal. NOT because of the system’s current “choices,” between Genocide Joe and MAGA fascist Trump. But because the sharp fissures between them—and across society—are likely to intensify through this. Society—and everyone’s lives—will be increasingly jolted and deadly illusions of “normalcy” are increasingly shattered by the storms ahead. To have a real chance to influence and lead millions toward wrenching an emancipatory future out of all this, there needs to be a growing and organized force for revolution NOW, spreading it and fighting for its advance.

Yes, an Actual Revolution Is Hard—
But Not Only Is It More Possible Now, We Have Real Strengths

This revolution enters the fray with a tremendous strength which has never before existed in history: the leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the foremost revolutionary thinker and leader in the world, the architect of a whole new framework of human emancipation, the new communism.

BA is loved, and he is hated, and for the same reasons—most of all, because he is hard core for a real revolution, up against all the shortcuts, half measures and dead ends that now grip the “social movements.”

If you are serious, you want to know: Do we really need a revolution with all it entails? What is going to replace this? How could this powerful system with its repressive apparatus be defeated? How could we rapidly grow from few today to the millions of revolutionary people and thousands of organized forces needed?

There are scientific answers to these and other crucial questions in the work of BA.

To start, watch his recent interviews (youtube.com/therevcoms). In these, BA opens up his heart and his life, his scientific method and revolutionary strategy, his program for all to learn from and act on. BA’s new communism ruptures decisively with the poisonous notion that “the ends justify the means.” BA insists that our revolutionary methods and morality be thoroughly consistent with the ultimate goal of full emancipation. The humanity of this road, and the humanity of this person—BA—shines through in these interviews. We are proud to call him our leader!

BA has authored the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, a concrete vision and blueprint for a radically different society. There has never been a founding and governing document like this Constitution. It is a future worth fighting for.

With a radically different economic, political, and social system, this Constitution provides the framework to overcome centuries of oppression, exploitation, and antagonistic social divides, as part of a world process. Drawing from a range of human social experience, it will unleash and foster unprecedented dissent, intellectual and political ferment, and mass participation in the search for truth and as part of radically changing the world and emancipating humanity. The thoroughly scientific method and approach of BA’s new communism—and this Constitution—are necessary breakthroughs that provide the basis, approach and policies to resolve knotty obstacles and contradictions on this road.

This is radically different than the U.S. Constitution. Birthed in Black enslavement and genocide of Native peoples, that document enshrines an exploiters’ view of freedom and is used to oppressively dictate over us, and exploit and dominate the people of the world, to this day.

With the future at stake, four crucial challenges now:

1 When there is a concrete vision for a radically different, liberating society in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, will you seriously look into it, debate it, and fight to make it real?

Or will you let your mind—and humanity’s future—remain imprisoned within the limits of the system of capitalism-imperialism, whether through open embrace, AOC- and Bernie-style “democratic socialism,” or through the cynical anti-communist verdicts proffered by “leftists” and so-called academics?

2 Will you have the intellectual courage and the integrity to engage BA, his leadership and his breakthroughs?

Or will you play the “get-out-of-thought-free” card and succumb to cowards and opportunists who mask their virulent hostility to a real revolution by smearing BA and the Revcoms as a “cult,” or nonsensically claiming he has no right to speak as “an old white man”… all because they don’t want to admit that they have no real answers and are really just looking for a place for themselves within this monstrous system, regardless of the cost to humanity.

3 As the genocide in Palestine continues and the system strikes back, will you come back stronger, defending those under attack, inspiring and challenging others throughout society to join you in putting it on the line until the blockade and slaughter STOP!?

Or, now that the stakes have been raised, will you fall (or stay) silent, swallow your conscience and turn back on what so many of you—Jewish, Palestinian, and others—so righteously started?

Will you fight to transform campuses into hotbeds of resistance, into assemblies of intellectual and political ferment, debating decisive questions like “Reform or Revolution”? Or will you allow the NAZI-fication of the American academy—and the terrifying chill this would send across society?

4 As we head into this pivotal year, will you step into this revolution now and fight for it to become known and acted upon by millions as they are jolted into political life and the whole direction of the future is increasingly battled out?

Or will you let this revolution remain hidden through your inaction, leaving the millions of decent people—and billions of humanity—victim to the even greater depravities and horrors of this system?

DARE TO MAKE HISTORY

You, reading this letter, are among the far too few who even know about this revolution. Whether this spreads and takes hold now… whether this rare chance for revolution is seized and a future carved out where humanity everywhere is finally able to walk this Earth free… lies, to no small degree, in your hands. Do not sleepwalk down the paths this system has carved out for you and humanity. Join this revolution. Make it your mission. Don’t waste another day.