Colombia: "We need a real revolution and nothing less!"

4 May 2015. A World to Win New Service. Following are excerpts from the 1 May 2015 leaflet of the Revolutionary Communist Group (GCR) of Colombia. For the full text: www.acgcr.org. The second part, omitted here, describes how "revolutionary action has to become, and we have to struggle for it to become, carried out by millions of people (constituting a genuine movement for revolution led by a party that is really communist and revolutionary, and not just in name)." It extensively quotes a leaflet by the Revolutionary Communist Manifesto Group (awtwtns150330) to sketch out core principles for a communist-led revolution in oppressed countries. This includes the argument as to why, as a crucial part of carving out a new way forward, revolutionaries everywhere should study and debate the new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian, which addresses the experiences of the first wave of socialist revolutions, proposing a clearer idea of communism as a science and a re-envisioned approach to socialist revolution. This world is a horror for the immense majority of people, those at the bottom of society, those whose labour makes it function. Not only because of the intolerable conditions people live in but also because of the rise of individualism, ignorance and false illusions promoted by those who benefit from keeping the world as it is, based on exploitation and oppression. More than 25,000 children die of hunger or preventable diseases every day. Youth from the lower classes find themselves increasingly doomed to unemployment and criminalization, and are easy prey for all kinds of degradation. Increasingly, education and health care are commodities, and access to them is more and more difficult. The denigration of women (half of humanity) and their treatment as objects is constantly getting worse, and every day there are more rapes, macho violence and acid attacks. Pornography and prostitution are seen as "employment options". The environmental emergency is continuing and accelerating. Imperialism's endless wars and occupations, from Iraq to Afghanistan and from Mali to Syria, have led to a situation where reactionary religious fundamentalism also preys on the masses of people. These are not just vague generalizations. Just take a look at what has happened in the last few weeks. In disasters like the earthquake in Nepal, the causes are natural but the consequences are the result of human and social factors (a product of capitalist-imperialist domination and semi-feudalism.) The U.S., China and especially India use "humanitarian aid" to maintain this domination. The deaths of thousands of immigrants in the Mediterranean is due to socio-economic conditions and the wars the imperialists have unleashed in Africa and the Middle East. The countless and unrelenting murder of Black youth in the U.S. comes from national and class oppression. The list goes on. These are not just things that happen "somewhere else". Thousands of children die of hunger in La Guajira [the peninsula in north-west Colombia], and this country is far above the regional average when it comes to malnutrition. Colombia is one of the countries with the most acid attacks on women, the most victims of people-trafficking and child prostitution. The oppression and despoiling of indigenous minorities, from the Wayuu in the North to the Nasas, Guambianos y Pastos in the south-west, is an every-day affair. Millions of people have been displaced, mainly driven out of the countryside, robbed of their land by the government's armed forces and paramilitary groups working for landlords and agricultural capitalists. Thousands of youth from the shantytowns have been murdered to swell the army's body count of dead guerrillas and create fake successes for its "anti-subversive" war. Corporate agriculture and mining companies are increasingly destroying forests, highlands and rivers. The list goes on. Is there a way out of these horrors? Is it possible to have a country and world that are completely different? Is there an economic, social and political alternative to capitalism, a viable and truly emancipating society? Is it true that the attempts to build a really new, socialist society ended in "failure"? Is looking for some lesser evil all we can do – can we, at most, resist and seek reforms? The answers to these questions entail enormous consequences – and more questions. They need to be debated more widely and profoundly, but that's not enough. There are no formulas or recipes. But we do have the rich experience of a whole stage of revolution, more than a century and a half, full of great, concrete achievements, and we have a method and approach, a science based on the rich theoretical and practical legacy of the first stage of the revolution that ended with the restoration of capitalism in China starting in 1976 (capitalism had been restored in Russia since the mid 1950s). And since then there have also been theoretical developments and a rich experience (positive as well as negative) of revolutionary struggles, and resistance that has never given up. The point is not that we are predestined to win. There is no guarantee that we will triumph. Two possible futures confront each another: Will the imperialists (and their partners and accomplices in the oppressed countries) be able to impose their asphyxiating control and a dark future? Or will society advance on the revolutionary road and put an end to the suffering and poverty that capitalism (and semi-feudalism in many places, to various degrees) imposes on the people, so that once again we can build socialism, this time much better than the experiences of the first stage of the revolution, not as a final goal but as a transition to communism, unleashing a critical spirit in a way that benefits the great majority of humanity? It will take much struggle for this second alternative to win out. The capitalists-imperialists lead a whole international network of grinding exploitation protected by wars, torture and local dictatorships (whether open or not.) At certain critical moments hundreds, thousands and even millions of people would rather risk their lives than live another day under the conditions they have been forced to endure. In recent years we have seen the outbreak of very powerful protests by hundreds of thousands and millions of people, from North Africa and the Middle East to Brazil. In many of these places people find themselves paralysed or pulled to choose between unacceptable choices – between more of the same old regimes they have already rejected, or religious fundamentalists whose cruelty to the people is no less than the flunkies for the West they seek to replace. Or between reformist rebel forces whose radicality lies in their means and not the ends they seek, and which can only be considered armed NGOs, versus the old capitalist-imperialist exploiters and oppressors, and their landlord allies in countries with various degrees of semi-feudal relations. In Colombia today, most political forces claim that we have to chose between the alternatives being presented as part of the current peace negotiations [between the government and the FARC, the guerrilla army led for decades by the formerly pro-Soviet Communist Party of Colombia]. But as we have pointed out on several occasions, despite their chatter about "socialism" and "revolution", the traditional guerrilla groups do not represent a real way out of the current order. What they mean by socialism and revolution does not go beyond the demands of the revolutionary bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century. They denigrate real socialism and communism as "utopian" ideals. They are nothing but self-confessed social democrats. In the name of their "realism" their references continue to be "really existing socialism", or in other words, the phony socialism of the former Soviet Union in the 1960s-80s, and the European social-democratic governments as well. Their programme goes no farther than an "historic compromise"; a close collaboration between all the "nationally present" political parties, theorized and applied by [1970s Italian Communist Party leader Enrico] Berlinguer and other "Eurocommunists", and also applied by Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular in Chile. We have to confront these repugnant political options with a plan for social change that is as radical as it is totally realistic, based on a scientific approach to the problems we face and the lessons of previous revolutionary experiences. Today's nightmare will tend to get worse unless the people struggle to put society on a completely different path. There is such a different and liberating path – communist revolution. Only revolution, and nothing less than revolution, can emancipate humanity. A real, concrete revolution is much more than a protest, no matter how big and widespread that protest may be. A real revolution requires the organized participation of millions of people in a determined struggle to dismantle the existing state apparatus and system, and a completely different way to organize society, with completely different objectives and ways of living for the people. Today's revolutionary struggle must contribute to building, developing and organizing an all-out struggle for a real revolution. Otherwise, we will have to continue protesting against the same abuses generation after generation in the future... - Humanity needs revolution and the new synthesis of communism! - Stop patriarchal denigration, dehumanization and the subjugation of all women everywhere, and all oppression based on gender or sexual orientation! - Break the chains, unleash the fury of women as a mighty for revolution! - Stop capitalism-imperialism's destruction of the planet! - No more criminalization, police brutality and murder of youth from the popular classes! Let's stop thinking like Colombians – think like emancipators of humanity!