Revolution Books / Libros Revolución: 3 weeks til International Women's Day

February 14, 2022

**What You Need to Know and Engage This Week**

About the World and Revolution: In This Issue

On the Importance of Moving to Make March 8 an Outpouring of Protest to Defend the Right to Abortion

We post today three weeks before March 8, International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day comes this year when the fascist U.S. Supreme Court is moving to rip away women’s constitutional right to abortion, the right to decide whether or when to have a child. The revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, Bob Avakian (BA), wrote two weeks ago in “The Fight For Abortion Rights And The Emancipation of Women”: “The attack on the right to abortion is a move to further intensify the already horrific oppression of women, denying them control of their lives and their very bodies, reducing them to breeders of children, cruelly subordinated to men and a patriarchal male-supremacist society. Forced motherhood is in fact female enslavement.”

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Let’s put this attack in context. BA has in this period brought forward a major new work titled “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution.” This work provides crucial leadership to understand the whole situation we face right now, and to transform it—to wrench something “Truly Emancipating” out of this madness, as the title says. But the attempt to deprive women of this basic right concentrates a major prong of the assault of the “Something Terrible” that is not just looming in the distance but barreling down on humanity…unless it is massively resisted and defeated—and that bears heavily on whether there will be a real revolution, the only fundamental and lasting way to end not just the oppression of women but all exploitation and oppression.

Should this attempt succeed, as it is right now on track to do, it will be truly terrible and unbelievably negative not just for those who immediately suffer from this but for all women and indeed all of humanity. BUT really massive and uncompromising resistance against this attack, growing in the days before International Women’s Day and then on the day itself, could not only beat back the assault on the right to abortion but in so doing serve as a key part of the crucible out of which a revolutionary people, first in the thousands and then in the millions, could be forged to change “the terms of how masses of people see things and how every institution has to respond.”¹

The identification of this question—of the centrality of the right to abortion, of the fact that forced motherhood IS female enslavement—and the practical ways in which the revcoms have fought around this question up to today are hallmarks of the leadership of Bob Avakian. Go her e to get into what BA has brought forward on this question.

And as part of carrying forward overall leadership, Bob Avakian has contributed two new articles to the site this week that get into big questions of how that leadership is provided and how it is to be correctly understood. The first is “What Motivates My Works And How This Relates to Basic Objectives, Methods and Principles”

and the second is “Bob Avakian Speaks To ‘Cult’: A Ridiculous, Ignorant, and Irresponsible Accusation…We Are Applying a Scientific Method and Approach To Understanding, and Transforming, the World To Emancipate Humanity .” Together these give insight into how to understand the relationship between leadership, and initiative and ferment coming from those who are being led, and how this is carried through in the new communism—and these articles wage sharp struggle in the process against wrong and, in some cases, highly irresponsible misunderstandings.

The Urgent Need for Massive, In-the-Streets, Determined Protest

To return to the attack on abortion rights, it has to be said: With the stakes outlined here, the alarm must be raised in all of society and the streets must be filled with people from many different viewpoints and walks of life in resistance. People must be shaken awake.

Yet the so-called “pro-choice” or “reproductive rights” movement has been silent—or worse. Some call for hunkering down for a 40-year-fight to “take back” state legislatures through elections while others talk of helping a few women with this or that stop-gap measure as millions will face the prospect of forced motherhood with no way out. And the “women’s movement” itself has been so infected with “wokeness” that many won’t even speak of how this will intensify the oppression of women as women, in the name of gender-neutral “inclusion” of trans men and nonbinary people who may also need abortions.

These responses don’t just fall short, they lead away from what must be done. As BA went on to say in the piece quoted above:

Anything which waters down or distracts from this essential truth is objectively aiding this fundamental attack on the half of humanity that is female—is undermining the fight for their emancipation, and the emancipation of humanity as a whole from any form of oppression and exploitation.

At this point, the only serious opposition to this attack is concentrated in the statement from Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and what they’re calling for. Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) has boldly called for everyone—every individual, every organization, every institution concerned with this right and opposed to the direct immediate threat against it—to join in major outpourings on International Women’s Day. These outpourings in turn must be seen as stepping stones to a massive, relentless, in-the-streets movement determined to beat back this attack. Go her e to find out more on RU4AR, here to find out more about these International Women’s Day actions, and here for news of a bold protest being planned earlier in New York City, leading up to the Day.

Even as we fight to unite all who can possibly be united in this broader mass struggle, including people who disagree with our revolutionary outlook and goals, we revcoms take these actions up as part of making an actual revolution, a revolution getting to a whole different—to an emancipated—world. BA has insisted, as a cornerstone of the new communism he’s brought forward, that

You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can’t say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution. (BAsics 3:22)

Again—read these works, and watch these films (here and here), that go deeper into why this is so and what this revolution is all about—on this question, but on the whole new world that must be brought into being.

What Must Be Done—NOW?

So what must be done by those who see the need to defend this right and to turn people out on March 8 in defense of this right and FOR the liberation of women, as part of emancipating all humanity?

Go out among the masses now, among different sections of the people, and raise hell!

Shake things up and shake people awake. Wage fierce struggle among them to see what is going down and act accordingly… and wage another kind of struggle against the fascists driving to eviscerate this right and the theocratic, patriarchal lunatics they have organized. On that basis, unite all who see—or who can be won through struggle to see—the need to defend women's fundamental right to abortion.
Do all this while bringing forward and organizing people around the only real solution—revolution—and infusing them with the scientifically grounded hope that this revolution can not only emancipate humanity but that the possibility for that revolution is present in the very conditions we face now… if we dare to seize it, through sharp ferocious struggle.
In short apply what is in Bob Avakian’s new talk, "Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating," and as you are applying it, make it known and engaged all over.

To that end, we are giving you analysis, orientation and information relevant to International Women’s Day, and we are sharing reports from revolutionaries who are working to apply the “foundation and roadmap” in "Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating."

As part of that necessary ferment and initiative—and as a part of getting going the process we urgently need to set in motion—we are including “field” reports from revcoms who are carrying forward in “fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution,” on a number of fronts. And go here to the revcom page devoted to building powerful outpourings on March 8.

In addition, we are covering other critical events in the world as well as including new correspondence from one of the two million prisoners now being held in America’s hellhole dungeons... and news from the struggle to free political prisoners in Iran. Get into the table of contents below and make sure to get the whole picture.

Think the System Is “Listening to People’s Outrage About Police Murder”? THINK AGAIN!!

The Monsters in the White House and the Starving Children in Afghanistan: Biden Administration Acts Decisively… to Intensify Crisis and Suffering

The So-Called “Truckers’ Protest”: A Major Initiative by Canadian—and International—Fascist Forces

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FOOTNOTES:

1. This is from BA’s “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating.” The full sentence reads:

Everything depends on bringing forward a revolutionary people, from among the most bitterly oppressed, and all parts of society, first in the thousands and then in the millions, as a powerful revolutionary force, organized from the start and consistently with a country-wide perspective, impacting all of society and changing the terms of how masses of people see things and how every institution has to respond. Everything must be focused now on actually bringing forward and organizing this revolutionary force.

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