Revolutionary Communist Group of Colombia on 1 May: The world needs a real revolution and the new communism! And nothing less!

14 May 2018/ A World to Win News Service. The original Spanish text of the following statement by the Revolutionary Communist Group (GCR) of Colombia is available at www.acgcr.org

The world today is one of suffering, wars, destruction of the environment, the brutal oppression of minority nationalities in all kinds of countries, a world in which half of humanity, women, are subjected to degradation and oppression in horrible forms. We are approaching a key crossroads. In the most powerful country on the planet, which largely shapes what is happening in the world, the fascist Trump/Pence regime is moving to establish a fascist United States. This regime and its powerful sponsors can shatter the bourgeois-democratic rule of law and manoeuvre so that this fascist United States dominates the world. The Trump/Pence regime is cooking up a big war... this is what they are aiming and planning for (the "rapprochements" on the Korean peninsula and the Middle East are part of the ritual of war). The point of calling this regime fascist is not to mobilize people by means of horrifying exaggerations. The horror that Trump represents is not another "swing of the pendulum". What we face is a REGIME and not simply the worst of all the reactionary Yankee administrations (whether Democratic or Republican). It is a regime that is radically restructuring society in a fascist direction.

At this crossroads, what is at stake is the future of humanity. The Trump/Pence regime faces the need – in the United States and internationally – to radically restructure the form of government and international relations, shattering the customary democratic norms that have legitimized the capitalist-imperialist system in the eyes of the majority. They have made considerable progress in adopting policies to concretize their fascist programme of "America First" and "Make America Great Again". The danger this poses – of war, potentially nuclear war, and the immediate hammering into place of new, more draconian laws that eliminate civil and democratic rights – makes it all the more urgent that revolutionaries organize and forge unity more broadly... in every country, and with the revolutionaries and anti-imperialists who together with others fighting in the "belly of the beast" are forging the organization Refuse Fascism (RefuseFascism.org).

The fact that this fascist regime is being consolidated is a nightmare not only for the American people but for the world. But there is a way to stop it, a path that requires courage, conviction and determination. Yes, there is a lot at stake, but as Refuse Fascism says: "This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!" This is not in any way an argument in favour of the ordinary capitalist-imperialist regime.

In no way is it an exaggeration to point out that the rightward shift in the world has been rapidly consolidating. In France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Ukraine, the Philippines, etc., the far-right forces – who really are fascists – have gained unprecedented strength (also underpinned by religious fundamentalism), even taking the reins of power in too many cases. Only empty-headed people can believe the stupid argument that this is a simple question of appearances "because Lenin said so a little more than a century ago" and even go so far as to say that what we are really seeing today is "a tremendous growth (!) of the forces of the revolution", seeking to generate optimism with pious lies.

Today humanity does have the real possibility, but not the guarantee, of building a radically different world. A world that has eliminated the age-old division of people into classes that has condemned the the majority of humanity to be exploited and oppressed by a privileged handful. A world without imperialism and wars. A world where borders between countries do not exist. A world where women are not raped, degraded, and murdered, and instead fully participate in the transformation of society. A world where art and culture do not degrade or numb, but rather fire the imagination. A world where dissent and struggle for the truth are highly valued, where people take up the scientific method to understand and transform nature and society.

But the vast majority of people do not understand that this is possible due to the functioning of capitalism-imperialism (which in some oppressed countries is intertwined with different forms and degrees of feudalism). Capitalism-imperialism oppresses and smothers the spirit, and keeps people in superstition and ignorance. It promotes this even among people with a university education. Postmodernism, relativism and identity politics, for example, have disarmed people, limiting their ability to understand reality and seek the truth by denying the very existence of truth. 

What has to be done today to overcome this difficulty is not to generate optimism with "post-truths". The situation must be changed, the terrain must be changed, the terms of political discourse itself must be changed to focus on what really matters to humanity. We have to work so that more people, millions of people, centre their thinking and activity on the possibility and the necessity of revolution, conscious of what a revolution can truly achieve in the face of everything that afflicts humanity today. People have to know that the liberating science of communism – after the end of the first wave of revolutions in the 1970s – has been developed by Bob Avakian, who has put it on a more firmly scientific basis. They have to connect with his work, the new synthesis of communism (and not discard it in advance because of the lies hatched up by counter-revolutionaries of all kinds).

The new communism, which Avakian has brought forward, is the science, the strategy and the leadership for an actual revolution, and for a radically new society on the road to real emancipation. It is the key tool to fight the system and transform the people for revolution. The basis for transforming the world and moving beyond the economic, political and social formations that today brutally destroy lives and crush spirits lies in the productive capacity and technology, and people's creativity and knowledge. To unleash this potential, the complex reality of the world as it really is must be understood in order to discover the paths leading to fundamental change through a strategic approach to an actual revolution and a radically new society on the road to human emancipation. This concentrates Bob Avakian’s development of the new communism.

The new synthesis of communism embodies the greatest advance in real communist revolution and the potential for even more if people very broadly in society connect with it. It could transform the political terrain, bringing about a significant shift in the political terms so that people understand for the first time or understand from new angles the question of communism and seriously get into the question of whether another world is possible and if, in fact, what communism represents, as we consider it, is an "actual alternative, a real and viable alternative that can and should be fought for, with an actual prospect – not a guarantee, but an actual prospect – of winning, and an actual orientation of striving to win and being determined to win, in order to actually bring another world into being that would really be emancipating for the masses of oppressed people in the world who are suffering horribly under this system, and ultimately for humanity as a whole to be able to enter a whole new era, free of what has weighed it down for centuries and millennia now: relations of exploitation and oppression, and all the ignorance and superstition and misunderstanding of reality that's gone along with that and has reinforced that." [WHAT HUMANITY NEEDS: Revolution, and the New Synthesis of Communism, Bob Avakian, 1 October 2012.] 

The situation in the world cries out for revolution. But not just any revolution, nor with just any leadership. Avakian has made breakthroughs regarding the strategy for an actual revolution. The author of the constitution for the future socialist state, he has developed a radically new conception of socialism as a society that is much more liberating and on the road to communism. And he has developed the understanding of internationalism: that in order to emancipate all humanity from the chains of imperialism, the whole world comes first. The challenge before the revolutionaries and the masses of people is enormous. As rightly pointed out recently in Revolution newspaper (revcom.us): "We revolutionary communists are supposed to represent and speak in the name of the interests of all of humanity. And we are supposed to do so on the basis of science and nothing less. On that basis, we can in fact have a great deal of certitude in stating that what humanity needs, more than anything else, is a communist world, achieved through a process of revolutions (of the right kind) to establish socialist societies (of the right kind) as a transition and road, and a base for advance, to that communist world. So it’s not just communism we are fighting for, it’s the right kind of communism, the NEW COMMUNISM."

In truth there is nothing that would be more important to achieve in this period of history than to overcome some of these obstacles and make the New Communism widely known, engaged with and appreciated throughout society (and among all social strata) and the world, along with its architect, Bob Avakian (responsible for developing and advancing this new synthesis of communism, and who himself is a concentrated expression of its core principles and scientific methods). And it is also true that "if we don’t succeed in doing THAT – if we don’t succeed in making qualitative and quantitative breakthroughs in fulfilling THAT mission – then not much at all will come out of anything any of us have done over the past decades, or continue to do today."

This requires that many, many of you who are reading this statement get into this and contribute to creating a situation where many more people know about Bob Avakian and what he has brought forward, where many more people discuss, debate, interrogate and explore the new communism. That many, many of you coalesce into a real force with growing influence in society. This (and not an empty optimism based on post-truths or political truths) would bode well for the possibility of new communism spreading and taking root to an unprecedented degree in the next period.

NO to Trump, NO to Pence, NO to a fascist America! NO to imperialist aggression in Syria! NO to Zionist and imperialist aggression against Palestine! No to imperialist intervention in Venezuela!
Break the chains, unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution!
Cast away constitutional illusions, prepare a real revolution! Don’t vote!
Prepare minds, organize forces, prepare the ground for revolution!
What humanity needs is revolution and Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism!