This is The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. This is the program for you if you feel the dread, if you feel outraged, furious at the suffering in the world today. This is the program for you if you feel deep down that the world should not have to be this way. This is the program for you if you have the heart to fight for a better world....
If that’s you, you are in the right place... stay with us—there is a way out of the madness and horror.
This is a show about a real revolution to overthrow the system of capitalism-imperialism that we live under. A system that exploits and oppresses and takes lives and crushes spirits. This is a show that is about, and for, bringing into being a far better world where humanity could really flourish. This is a show about revolution—a real revolution and nothing less.
Welcome to The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. Today is January 27, 2022. This is our 86th episode. My name is Andy Zee, and I’m coming to you from Los Angeles, California.
If you are ready to travel with me, with us, with this show to see why and how something positive could come out of all the shit we face today, don’t be thinking: “Oh good, something positive so I can get back to normal.” “Oh good, I need a way out of the madness, I’m so done with COVID.” “Oh good, a program that will tell me how to take care of myself and live positive.”... NO. Wake the fuck up. The world is careening towards catastrophe, and there are fools, misguided people, and a whole system with rulers and people who speak for them who tell you what serves their interests, which are not our interests. Our interests are the interests of the 7½ billion people of the world.
We are going to get into that today in different ways, but first, let’s dig into the situation we face overall, and the way out.
To have the eyes and the heart to see all of that requires a scientific approach to reality—an objective approach to the world—not what you want to pretend it is. It is what is. BUT, it can be transformed through struggle. Struggle that is based on understanding objectively what the problem is we face and on that basis how to go about changing it.
The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show brings all this to you through the leadership and work of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian. Bob Avakian has been a revolutionary and communist since the 1960s. While most from that period gave up on revolution, Bob Avakian never lost sight that those most oppressed by this system, and in fact all of humanity, need revolution. Bob Avakian, BA, probed deeply into the struggles of the 1960s and the first genuine socialist revolutions of the 20th century, learning from those experiences as well as from broader work and experience throughout the world to develop a qualitatively more scientific understanding of the science of communism. Over decades he has developed a strategic framework to make a real revolution—a revolution on the road for the emancipation of all humanity. This is the new communism.
Bob Avakian has recently published a 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 is the guide out of the terrible future that looms, to wrench a positive liberating revolution. Through The RNL Show, you will learn about and experience Bob Avakian, and the framework and roadmap forward. This should lead you to go to our website, revcom.us, to read and study this work, discuss it with friends, get with the revcoms and be a part of organizing now for a real revolution.
This country is hurtling towards a fascist future. Talk of the potential of a second U.S. civil war has burst into media and public and private discourse. The Republican Party has become a fascist party—they are shattering the laws and the norms as to how this country has been ruled—discarding even the pretense of “democracy for all,” instead relying on naked brutality and trampling on the rights of the people.
Yet, what we hear from political and media liberal bloggers and blabbers is that this isn’t really fascism and a fascist party. They say this is just cowardice on the part of the Republican politicians who are afraid of pissing off the narcissistic idiot Donald Trump and his fanatical “base.” WRONG. This is objectively a fascist movement and party. Some liberal pundits, academics call this authoritarian—sure, that’s an expression of fascism. But fascism is something different. It is profoundly more repressive than that; it has a program, and it fundamentally discards the rule of law and is a more naked, thuggish form of rule of the capitalist-imperialist system we live under.
But the liberals run from that. Because for liberals to admit that this IS fascism, can lead masses of people to question the system that has given rise to this fascism. And more, it has the potential to compel people to look critically at the reality that the normal “democratic” capitalist form of rule is itself also a form of brutal dictatorship.
The fascist program is white supremacy, patriarchy, and xenophobia. Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of men forcefully rules over women in politics, morals, social status, and in control of wealth. Xenophobia is the hatred and fear of foreigners. This program is being packaged under the signboard of “America First”—which itself is a call for unrestrained unilateral exploitation and domination of the whole world.
These fascists are all about that triad of white power, suppression of women, immigrants, and America First. Bob Avakian sharply said five years ago that the Republican Party today is not the party of Lincoln but of the Confederacy. Joe Biden spoke to some of this reality a few weeks ago but almost immediately backed away from that.
The Democratic Party has NO ANSWER—no way to solve, to fundamentally uproot the problems of white supremacy, the oppression of women, of differently gendered people, and of immigrants. They can’t stop the system’s destruction of the environment and the drive to go to war to extend and preserve their empire.
The Democratic Party’s whole reason for being is to represent the interests of this system. Because of that, as I said, they do not want to call this out as fascism because of what that says about the system that brought it forward. Second, they are also targets of and fear this fascism, and that drives them to find a way to accommodate to it. Most of all they believe in and are loyal to the exploitative, oppressive capitalist-imperialist system.
For all their talk of “equality” and “inclusion,” their system has no answer… for these outrages are woven into the fabric of this system and country.
Let’s be real:
- For all the blah, blah, blah of a Green New Deal, that was never real and isn’t happening.
- For all the empty words of standing up for women, they are surrendering the right of women to abortion without a fight.
- After taking a knee with honeyed pledges that Black lives matter, what they are actually doing is refunding the police, getting tough on crime and doing almost nothing about the fascist suppression of Black and Latino voting rights. In New York City they’re even bringing back the special cop division that killed Amadou Diallo with 41 shots—while dressing them now in new windbreakers and bodycams to make it all seem better.
- For all of Biden’s denunciations of Trump for his treatment of immigrants, the situation on the border is a horror show with Vice President Harris telling the people south of the border to stay home.
- And for all the talk of peace and “Biden’s art of diplomacy,” the danger of war grows by the day.
Again, the Democrats and those who shill for them have no answers to any of the horrors and outrages that rob humanity of a future that you care about.
WHY? Because at root, these problems, these outrages are, as I’ve said, built into the capitalist-imperialist system, and they cannot be reformed away.
All Democrats and the “social democrats” who just wanna be big Democrats are offering is to vote for them which will only keep the same horror going on and on and on.
But here’s something else that they don’t want you to know:
Because those who rule over us are at each other’s throats…
Because Biden cannot “bring the country together”…
Because when they are fighting each other and the normal way society has been, is no longer in the offing…
Because those who rule can no longer do so in a way that the masses of people have been conditioned to accept…
Revolution has become possible.
In “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating,” Bob Avakian writes:
as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.
Bob Avakian has made a pathbreaking analysis and provided a framework to guide and a strategic roadmap to put revolution on the map, and to organize and recruit thousands and then millions of people to dare to be part of a real revolution for the liberating goal to emancipate humanity.
Today’s show will look at this in few a different ways.