Refuting the Biggest Lies Against Communism (5 articles)

    
Setting the Record Straight on Communism and Socialist Revolutionby Raymond Lotta The revolutions in Paris in
1871, in Russia in 1917 (to mid-1950s), and in China in 1949 (to
1976)--were all great historic breakthroughs. Hundreds of millions rose
up and gained precious experience as to what it would take to get to a
world without exploitation, without oppression, without destructive
violent clashes among humans, without enforced ignorance and
superstition. These first attempts to emancipate humanity were defeated.
History is being written by
the victors--the imperialists. The oppressors issue endless lies on what
'the wretched of the earth' were trying to do, what brutal forces lined
up against these heroic attempts, and why there were limitations and
even secondary errors in their theory and practice.
Bob Avakian (BA) has not
only defended these pathbreaking experiences, and shown a way to truly
understand them, but most importantly, he has developed a new communism
based on a much deeper and more scientific view of what is involved in
emancipating ALL humanity. The new communism of BA breaks with and is a
leap beyond the previous understanding of communist revolution and represents
and embodies a qualitative resolution of a critical contradiction that
has existed within communism in its development up to this point,
between its fundamentally scientific method and approach, and aspects of
communism which have run counter to this.' (From Resolution 1 of Six Resolutions of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, January 1, 2016)
Along with bringing out the
positive achievements of socialism and communist revolutions, and
critiquing these previous revolutions through the prism of the new
synthesis--how to do better next time around--there is a real need to
boldly challenge the flow of lies, slanders, distortions, and phony
representations of this history that has lowered sights and shut down
discussions over how the world should/could be radically different. The
lies serve to reinforce the rotten status quo and its conformist wisdom
that the best we can do is adjust or reduce the misery in today's
capitalist world order. This series aims to answer the most widespread
lies about communist revolution. Raymond Lotta is an advocate for Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism. He is a political economist and author of America in Decline and You Don't Know What You Think You 'Know' About... The Communist Revolution and the Real Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future. He writes for Revolution/revcom.us and is a spokesperson for The Bob Avakian Institute. He has written extensively on China during and after the Cultural Revolution and has, through the 'Set the Record Straight Project,' which he leads, fought to spread the truth--and refute the lies--about the experience of the communist revolution in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1956 and China between 1949 and 1976.

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Hurricane Florence Hits the Carolinas: A Natural Occurrenceâ??An Unnatural and UNNECESSARY Disaster (4 articles)

    
Category 4 Hurricane Michael battered the coast of the
Florida Panhandle October 10, before moving through Georgia, the Carolinas, and
on to Virginia. Michael, which came less than a month after Hurricane Florence,
was reportedly the most powerful storm ever to hit the Panhandle. It left death
and massive destruction in its wake, including nearly obliterating the entire
town of Mexico Beach where it made landfall.
Meanwhile, on October 8, two days before Michael hit Florida, a news report by
the United Nations' leading body on climate science, the United Nation's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that the climate
crisis is not a far-off problem--it's happening right now, and it's accelerating
more quickly and having more devastating impacts much sooner than previously
understood. The report called for radical, 'unprecedented' transformations
starting immediately to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels to
prevent a global catastrophe. A co-chair of the group of 91 scientists from 40
different countries who wrote the report calls the next few years 'probably the
most important in our history.'
In this series on Hurricane Florence, we examine how the capitalist-imperialist
system of today fuels such hurricanes and worsens the death and destruction,
and we start to grapple with why and how it would be radically different in a
genuinely socialist society.

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