“Communism? Great idea, but it’ll never work. And besides, you could never make a revolution in a country like this anyway.”
Ever heard that? No doubt—and maybe it’s what you think. After all, it’s the conventional wisdom. But in a time when the future on offer from capitalism is increasingly bleak… when the heartless machinery of empire grinds and crushes people all over the world… when political institutions have no answers—or at least no answers that lead anywhere good… maybe the conventional wisdom really isn’t so wise, after all.
As a matter of fact, it’s dead wrong. Bob Avakian is a revolutionary thinker and leader—and he’s someone you need to know about. Bob Avakian has tirelessly exposed the myth of an unchanging human nature. He’s shown the workings of a system behind the crushing of hopes and foreshortened lives of billions. He’s deeply examined and analyzed the first wave of communist revolutions, upholding their overwhelmingly positive achievements while going deeply into their shortcomings and sometimes serious errors—in order to do better. He’s further developed the vision of socialism as a vibrant society in active transition to a world where humanity is no longer enchained in class divisions, or oppressive social relations, or social antagonisms of any kind. The model developed by Avakian is both visionary and viable: one in which the state power is a vehicle for the broadest sections of people, including and especially the formerly exploited and oppressed, while there is room for and encouragement of ferment and dissent, experimentation and exploration among all the people. It’s a vision of a society that does not plunder the planet or its people, that instead strives to be a caretaker of the environment for future generations and works to be a base area for revolution and revolutionary transformation all over the world. And he’s put forward a strategy to get to that society, and is leading a party that is preparing to lead millions to carry out that strategy and realize that vision when conditions emerge to do so.
In short—because of the work that Bob Avakian has done over several decades, summing up the positive and negative experience of the communist revolution so far, and drawing from a broad range of human experience, there is a new synthesis of communism that has been brought forward—there really is a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world, and there is the crucial leadership that is needed to carry forward the struggle toward that goal.
These times demand radical thinking, and radical solutions. Any decent, thinking human being needs to know about Bob Avakian and the work he’s done. Anyone who agonizes about the future of the people on this planet needs to engage the analysis and the vision he’s brought forward.