“I know what can happen if you really don’t have marriage equality under the law and a lot of the rights that are bestowed on heterosexuals just for being married are just not granted. I know what can happen to you in a hospital, like my partner’s dying and I can’t come in the room, or my second cousin, who I haven’t seen in 20 years, can come and take the house we built with our bare hands. It’s not ok, it’s not fair, it’s not right and I would even say it’s amoral.”—A Black lesbian speaking to Revolution at a protest at the Mormon temple in Oakland

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Many people, including people actively involved in the protests against Proposition 8, see the election of Barack Obama and the passing of Proposition 8 as a perplexing contradiction because they see Obama as a progressive who supports civil rights and will reverse the dark years of the Bush regime. They have been hoping that Obama will soon step up and say or do something to get Proposition 8 overturned. But Obama has a lot of unity with the Christian fascists on the question of gay marriage and on using religion to cohere the empire.

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The idea that Obama’s election shows something “redemptive” about America—including its ability to “self-correct,” even with regard to what have to be acknowledged as long-standing and profound injustices, such as the whole experience of Black people in this country—will not only be incessantly propagated by the ruling class in this country, including by Obama, but also by “allies” of the U.S. in other parts of the world—and it will have a “spontaneous resonance” with many “ordinary people” in countries throughout the world, who—like the masses of people, of all strata and nationalities, in the U.S.—lack a scientific understanding of the oppression of Black people, of the nature of U.S. society and its role in the world overall, and in general of social and political questions. 

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In a discussion of the election with students in New York City recently, Carl Dix said, “Look I understand why people, especially Black people, are getting so excited about seeing a Black person getting elected president. Black people have been told from day one of what they couldn’t do, what they weren’t qualified for or capable of. So this was something that most people thought would never happen, or at least that they’d never see it in their lifetime.

“I’m old enough to have had white supremacy thrown up in my face again and again....”

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On October 26, speakers from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA gave talks in New York and Los Angeles on “Making Revolution in the U.S.A.” Revolution is posting the entirety of the speech on its website, and serializing it in the newspaper. It has been slightly edited for publication.

Let’s start with the four questions that were posed in the announcement for this event:

Do we need a revolution and a radically different society? What is happening every day—what this system does to people day in, day out—here and all over the world, cries out: YES, WE DO.

Is revolution really possible in a country like the U.S.? YES, IT IS.

Is there actually a strategy and method for approaching how to make such a revolution? YES, THERE IS.

Is there a group that is organized on the basis of that strategy and method, is working for such a revolution, and could lead that revolution when the time is right? YES, AGAIN.

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We are at an historic moment when much is at stake. At the same time, it is a moment when we, the people of this country, can and must wrench the future of the world from the hands of the Bush Regime and its heirs to bring forth a better world. We invite you to join us in considering the road forward at an important conference in Chicago in November.

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Since early October, Revolution correspondent Sunsara Taylor has been on a national campus speaking tour, giving talks on the recent book by Bob Avakian, Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. The Away With All Gods! tour has brought Sunsara Taylor before high school classrooms, and to groups who are part of the growing secular, atheist & freethought movement on college campuses. Tour stops have included Sonoma State University, sponsored by Project Censored lecture series; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University, sponsored by Atheists, Humanists & Agnostics; and two public high schools. Upcoming events include an appearance at UCLA sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion; the Santa Monica Public Library; Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists, at University of Minnesota; Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in Minneapolis; and Cleveland State University sponsored by the Department of Black Studies (see box on this page for tour times and dates). On November 6, Sunsara Taylor was part of a colloquium sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA on “Away With All Gods—Possibility or Fantasy?” with Dr. S. Scott Bartchy, Director of the Center.

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• updates and more tour information

Thursday, November 20, 6:45-9:00
New York University
Kimmel Ctr. Room 914, 60 Washington Square South

with
Massimo Pigliucci - Professor of Biology and Philosophy at SUNY - Stony Brook.
Sunsara Taylor - writer for Revolution newspaper.
Paul Eckstein - Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bergen Community College, Paramus NJ.
Moderated by: Matthew LaClair - currently a student at Eugene Lang College, President of The Center for Inquiry on Campus.

Get PDF of flier.

For more correspondence, click box at top of right column.

Poster—Download PDF

The first time I ever heard about revolution was through the pages of Revolution newspaper. I was already somewhat conscious and considered myself a communist, but I did not know about revolution.

I first saw the newspaper at last year’s immigrant rights marches in Los Angeles. It was the special issue on Bob Avakian. Later, my friend and I decided to go to downtown and check out the Libros Revolución where one of the people there asked if we wanted to “do something cool” [and go out] to talk to people on the street and film their reactions to Bob Avakian’s DVD “Revolution: why it’s necessary, why it’s possible, what it’s all about.” It was the first time I met these revolutionaries but my friend and I decided to go ahead and jump in the car with them as we followed the buses with the ads all over L.A.

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There is no doubt that history has been made, “for reasons that go beyond the obvious ‘first Black’ aspect of race.” 2008 was the first year in modern history that Blacks made no demands on the Democratic candidate—and consequently, were promised nothing. This was the election cycle in which the Black who began as a supposed “underdog” became the most heavily-funded candidate of all time. There are many lessons to be learned—but few of them palatable to folks still drunk on ObamaL’aid. 

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There is much hope among Black people broadly, as well as among many people of other nationalities, that the election of Barack Obama has brought a “new day” for the situation that African Americans face. A hope that with a Black President in the White House, there will be a major course change in the long, ugly history of racism and white supremacy in this country, which has meant so much brutality and suffering for Black people, from the days of slavery up to today. You could see this hope in the faces of hundreds of thousands of people who gathered at Grant Park in Chicago on election night for Obama’s victory rally—a huge multi-national gathering in one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. But on that same night, in the same city, there were vicious reminders that this is still America.

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In early October, a couple of teachers and myself, supporters of Revolution Books, conducted a one and a half hour workshop for teachers, entitled, “What Is Democracy: A Revolutionary Critique of Jeffersonian Democracy—Challenging Conventional Thinking,” based on Bob Avakian’s new work, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy at the annual “Teachers for Social Justice (TFSJ)” conference in San Francisco. In attendance was a multi-national, radical-minded crowd of 1300 teachers and prospective teachers from all over California, with the majority being younger, in the 20- to 30-year-old range.

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I am a prisoner of Afrikan Descent, being held in one of the various Security Housing Units (SHU) they have within California’s prison structure. I have been amongst these conditions for two years now, in which I have been confined in these prison institutions since I was eighteen years old which I’m twenty-five years of age now. Me personally, I’m just another statistic to the prison rate of millions of other Afrikans, within this country held in prisons across this nation of Amerika.

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