May 16, 2022 A Guide to This Issue of Revolution What You Need to Know and Engage This Week About the World and Revolution |
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Tens of Thousands Pour Into the Streets for Abortion Rights: A Big Advance! |
The past week witnessed tens of thousands of people in hundreds of cities pour into the streets around abortion rights, with a militant determined spirit at the backbone. The outpouring followed a leak 12 days earlier of a draft decision from the Supreme Court that would repeal the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and totally take away all constitutional protection for the right to abortion. It was an opening wave with the potential not just to derail the locomotive now speeding down the tracks to outlaw abortion, but to begin to change the whole direction of things. Whether that potential is realized is in significant part up to those of you reading this. |
This past Thursday, several thousand students burst out of class in protest, answering a call from Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights. The students, mostly from high schools, marched everywhere from New York to Little Rock, from the suburbs of San Francisco to Kentucky and Iowa, walking out of class in defiant demonstrations at times hundreds strong, with an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 marching through the streets of New York City alone. These walkouts, spread mostly by word of mouth and social media, showed a glimmer of the potential of what could be brought to bear. Then on Saturday, tens of thousands of people came out to demonstrate for abortion rights. Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights had originally called demonstrations on May 14 as part of the May 8 to 14 week of defiance they announced a month ago. They welcomed the actions of Planned Parenthood, MoveOn, and others in calling for demonstrations on the same day, also for abortion rights. At the same time, Rise Up held to its position that the message of the day had to be to get in the streets and stay in the streets to defeat the attempt of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. Some of the solutions and paths at the more mainstream marches—for instance, “voting out the Republicans in November”—essentially surrender to the Supreme Court just going ahead and repealing Roe, now, when it is on the docket for decision. |
The Rise Up marches involved over 10,000 people in about 40 cities. They often marched to the larger marches in a spirit of uniting people to take this struggle further. These Rise Up marchers struggled for the position of winning this battle NOW, bringing masses of people into the streets day after day and shutting this country down, to prevent this government and the Supreme Court in particular from ripping away the right of women to control their own bodies. It is important to continue to insist that every person and every organization who opposes this attack work now with all our might to prevent this decision from coming down. |
Last Monday, we ran the article "The Supreme Court Moves to End Abortion Rights: ‘Taking to the Streets,’ And Refusing to Let This Go Down, Bob Avakian Speaks to This Critical Juncture in the Fight for Abortion Rights, The Road Forward, and Avoiding Dead Ends.” In that article Bob Avakian (BA) makes the point that: Right now, as opposed to relying on and being restricted by the Democrats, everyone who refuses to see women reduced to breeders of children, dominated by men and a male supremacist society, everyone who cares about living in a just society, needs to be taking to the streets—and staying in the streets—in massive, sustained, growing protest and rebellion aimed at preventing the Supreme Court (and fascists more broadly) from denying women the right to abortion, with everything that would represent (and the terrible future it foreshadows). Forced motherhood IS female enslavement. |
Just the BeginningOne thing that stood out at the Rise Up marches was the dynamic program to continue this fight, to bring forward the needed protest to stop this. Rise Up called for National Green-Up and Walk-Out for this Thursday, May 19—a day on which people throughout society should wear green and when Rise Up aims to organize and inspire another much larger round of student walkouts and rallies. This then will build to a big leap toward the kind of determined, sustained struggle that shuts things down. And that—Shut The Country Down—is the slogan for May 26, with walkouts and work stoppages at noon and people from there converging into the streets. This will not be an easy fight; but it is a fight that we must go all-out to win. |
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The potential for this ambitious program lies in the people who were at the rallies and the thousands and millions more who feel like them, or could be won to feel like them. The crowds at these Rise Up rallies were marked by a spirit of rage against this attack on women, a quest to understand the roots of it, and a fierce determination to convince others to not let this go down. This spirit, this quest, this determination are the bedrock keys to winning this battle, and the sparks they have set off must be kindled into a much brighter, higher, hotter blaze. Today we are highlighting videos and photos from these outpourings; come back to the site on Wednesday night for a fuller picture and deeper analysis of all this. In the meantime, do this: |
- Read, distribute, think about and discuss the critically important article by Bob Avakian referred to above: “The Supreme Court Moves to End Abortion Rights: ‘Taking to the Streets,’ And Refusing to Let This Go Down, Bob Avakian Speaks to This Critical Juncture in the Fight for Abortion Rights, The Road Forward, and Avoiding Dead Ends.”
- Get out the calls far and wide for the next big actions coming from Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, set for May 19 and 26, and help people organize these.
- Watch and listen to a talk from Sunsara Taylor, a revcom follower of Bob Avakian and one of the initiators of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, on a livestream (info to come). The talk is titled "Overturn Roe? Hell No!" If you’re in New York City, come to Revolution Books in Harlem to watch it live with others (Wednesday, May 18, 7 pm EDT. Go HERE for details).
- All throughout the week, take up the work of Bob Avakian, “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." Read it, restudy it if you have read it, and get it to others.
- Watch The RNL Show and take up the call of the 100th episode to spread, support and volunteer to work with the show.
Toward the end of the essay “Taking to the Streets,” BA writes: |
Fundamentally, to bring about a more just society and world, what is needed, and all the more urgently now, is a revolution to overthrow this whole system, which both Democrats and Republicans represent and work to enforce, even as they have sharp differences between them over how to do this. In “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating,” I have analyzed in depth why this is a rare time when revolution becomes more possible, even in this powerful country. It is crucially important to understand why this is so—which has to do with the already very deep, and continually deepening, divisions, not only in the country overall but particularly within the ruling class, and why that ruling class cannot continue to rule in the “normal way” it has for generations—and how to move to build up the revolutionary forces with the strategy and organization capable of seizing on this rare opportunity, not in order to achieve a “peaceful transfer of power” from one section of the capitalist-imperialist ruling class to another, but to bring about a seizure of power by a revolutionary people, numbering in the millions and millions and determined to bring about a truly emancipating change—bringing down this monstrous system and building up a radically different and far better system. |
Coco Das, a writer and leader of Refuse Fascism, in a speech in Austin, Texas, on May 14, after talking about the importance of uniting broadly to go all out to win this battle for women’s right to abortion, connected it to what kind of future there will be. She talked about how reading BA has given her an understanding of why we face this and what is really possible, and how that has grounded her for this fight. And she said in pointing to this talk, “We are living in a time when the future of humanity truly hangs in the balance, a time when the problems we face will be resolved one way or another, as Avakian says, in a way that is ‘something terrible, or something truly emancipating.’ And I don’t know about you, but I want to go for the truly emancipating.” |
Now is the time for those who have read “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating” and gotten into it to get this work out there to those awakening to political life who do NOT want to keep fighting the same battles, who do NOT want to cave in to the steamrolling fascist movement they see right before their eyes, whose hearts ache and who want to yell when they see immigrants drowning at sea or languishing at the borders, who cannot take one more murder by the police or the fascist racist vigilantes, who are NOT okay with the earth frying to a crisp, whether through ecological catastrophe, nuclear war or both. They are legion, and we must reach them. In this issue, we also feature Bob Avakian’s reply to former SDS members who criticized earlier essays from BA on Ukraine; this new piece is entitled “THE WAR IN UKRAINE AND THE INTERESTS OF HUMANITY: A SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH VS. HARMFUL CONFUSION AND CHAUVINIST DELUSION, Bob Avakian Responds To People Who Should Know Better (and Maybe Once Did).” In addition, in this time of extreme attacks and outrages, we think it’s extremely important to cover two particularly obscene outrages that have gone down in the past week: the murder of ten Black people in a Buffalo, New York grocery store by a white supremacist fanatic and the death of a Palestinian journalist followed by an attack on her funeral by Israeli police. See you Thursday, in the streets! See the table of contents for a list of articles included in this issue. |
| “...we have two choices: either, live with all this — and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all — or, make revolution!”—Bob Avakian |
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Unbelievable as it may seem, in the 21st century there are still people—including people in positions of power and authority—who are determined to force women to bear children, regardless of the situation, the feelings, and the better judgment of those women themselves. That is a way of enslaving women to the dictates of an oppressive male supremacist, patriarchal system; and that is what the cruel fanatics who are determined to deny women the right to abortion are really all about. — Bob Avakian |
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