Rpp Post 1972 Election Statement--part Ii

RPP POST 1972 ELECTION STATEMENT-PART II

(Editor's Note: The first half of the RPP Post-1972 Election Statement ("Masters of Deceit") appeared in the last issue (43) of the Ann Arbor SUN. The second half, "Four More Years of Struggle," takes up where the first section left off, looking toward the next four years of Nixon's administration and what it means to people in our community.)

As we said before, the first thing we have to understand about the Nixon/CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President) victory November 7th is that it was a desperate victory, the result of desperate strategies and even more desperate tactics on the part of the CREEP forces, and it must be seen as a clear example of the extreme desperation which characterizes the behavior and activities of the reactionary class which controls the United States government.

We have said many times that it is the people who are strong in the final analysis, and the reactionaries who are weak, no matter how hard the reactionaries try to convince us that the reverse is the case. Capitalism and its inevitable extension, imperialism, are at the end of their rope as vital historical forces; with no more room to expand, and with more and more of its colonies and neo-colonies rising up against it to reclaim their land and their material and human resources from the international pigs of imperialism, the furious disruptive force of international capital is turned back upon itself to wreak havoc within the very citadel of capitalism, the infamous mother-country USA.

We believe with revolutionaries all over the planet that the victory of the people and the total defeat of imperialism are equally inevitable, that we are progressing more and more rapidly (in world-historical terms) toward the people's final victory, that each people's victory, no matter how small, further weakens the faltering strength of the imperialists, and that the correct strategy for the people is to continue the protracted struggle on all fronts against the imperialist octopus, cutting off its tentacles everywhere they appear and destroying its power step by step.

It may be hard to relate to this analysis in the face of what has been presented as the most smashing presidential victory in many years, but we would point again to the incredible lengths to which the CREEP forces were forced to go in order to insure Nixon's victory, (including the attempted assassination of George Wallace, an obvious CIA trick, and the "Peace at Hand" ruse), the fact that only some 55% of the registered electorate bothered to vote in the presidential election, the monstrous sums of money (more than $37 million at last count) spent by the Nixon/CREEP gang on the advertising campaign for the Nix, and the willingness of the CREEPs to risk major exposures on many fronts in order to secure Nixon's re-election, as clear indications of the desperate straits in which the reactionaries presently find themselves forced to operate.

If Nixon and the super-rich reactionaries he fronts for were in a position of strength they wouldn't have to do any of this shit, and whatever criminal operations they found it necessary to pull off wouldn't be continually exposed to the broadest masses of the American people as they are now. They wouldn't need to flood the streets of our communities-white, black, brown and rainbow alike-with heroin and Quaaludes and other severe depressants in order to maintain control of the population; they would instead continue to rule virtually unopposed, as they did in the 50's, with no fear of effective resistance to their horrendous master plan for total control of the planet and its people.

Above all, they wouldn't need to expend so much money and energy in trying to convince us of our weakness and their strength, because their strength would be readily apparent and our own weakness equally so. If they were actually strong our numbers would be decreasing instead of increasing every day, their attempted suppression of our mass movement would be an unqualified success instead of an outright failure, they would have all of us safely under their thumb instead of being on the verge of losing their grip completely, and we would all be caught up in a desperate attempt to defend our persons and our people from immediate extermination instead of being able to devote most of our time and energy, as we do here in Ann Arbor, to organizing our communities and building people's institutions to serve our people's needs while we establish, consolidate and extend more and more people's power on the most basic levels.

Nixon's Next Four Years. . .And Ours

Our point is that the Nixon regime has plumbed the depths of desperation in order to maintain its hold on the government, and that it will stop at nothing during the next four years in trying to maintain that government's already-slipping hold on the people it has had under its control for so long. This is where we must have no more illusions: four more years of Nixon means exactly that, four more years of the same desperate shit that we've suffered through since 1968, except that their desperation will increase precisely as the strength of the people continues to grow and develop, and they will be forced to expose themselves more and more as their hand gets weaker and weaker.

At the same time we have to understand that Nixon's attempts to convince us of his strength and our weakness are simply functions of the reactionaries' desperation to hold on to their control over our destiny. We have to understand that we-and the people as a whole-are the rising force in the world today, that we are in fact strong and getting stronger all the time, and that the only correct way to combat the desperate strategies of the reactionaries is to become ever less desperate ourselves, ever more rational and deliberate in our own strategies, and ever more dedicated to creating and expanding people's power on every level which will enable us to resist ever more effectively and to build our potential strength higher every day.

We can't tell precisely what measures the Nixon clique will take during the next four years in its attempt to maintain its steadily-weakening grip on the people of the world, but we know from the last four years, and particularly from the excesses of the CREEP re-election effort this past two years, that we can expect anything up to and including the bombing of Ann Arbor, Oakland, and other progressive communities where people's power is being created and Consolidated. We have witnessed the most massive crimes in the international arena, and the most systematic persecution of progressive forces within the USA, during the first Nixon term, and we are prepared to witness even more horrible excesses between now and 1976, but the point to remember is that we have not only survived but have grown steadily stronger during the course of Nixon's rule, and that this is true not only of Ann Arbor but of our people as a whole, even though people in most places haven't yet begun to develop even the most primitive forms of community organization to deal with their needs as we have begun to do here.

Nixon and his gang can be counted on to do whatever history forces them to do in attempting to maintain their power, including unleashing the Just-Us Department again; undermining the so-called "checking power" of the Supreme Court the rest of the way; murdering masses of students, workers, freeks, black people, chicanos, and other oppressed people who dare to challenge the government's policies; placing dangerous areas of the country, particularly those areas where people aren't just rioting but are organizing their communities into bastions of people's power, under military rule; singling out individuals in these communities for extermination by CIA assassins, individuals who have demonstrated positive leadership qualities in doing community work and who have won the respect of their people; stepping up their constant and relentless program for infiltrating and/or coopting people's movements and twisting them around so that they benefit the government and actually harm the people; increasing the flow of death drugs into our communities in an attempt to bring the people totally under their control, turning the cities into literal jungles of chaos and terror and preventing communities from ever coming into being; generally developing ever more horrendous and bizarre control devices and methods to deal with the ever-rising ferment among the masses of the people everywhere, a ferment which even their most powerful control machinery cannot succeed in bringing back under a volatile boil.

We repeat that we cannot predict what atrocities the Nixon gang may be moved to commit over the next four years, either here at home or out around the world; we only know that they will be extreme, as the reactionaries' condition is extreme, and that they will be born out of desperation and total fear rather than out of strength and clear-sightedness. We know that the reactionaries will expose themselves further to the people of the world with 0each successive move they make, and that the contradictions which are inherent in the capitalist system and which grow higher each day will continue to develop to higher and higher levels as the reactionaries flail about in their furious desperation.

We know most of all that, whatever Nixon and his gang attempt to pull off, no matter how intense it might be, there is no way they can possibly gain a victory for their obsolete life-form in the end - no way. They may appear to be winning at certain stages and for certain periods of time, but their overall and final defeat is inevitable. They have no viable future - that's precisely why they're so desperate, and just as precisely why their desperate strategies are doomed to failure in the end. They have no basis - certainly no economic basis-for their continued existence, they are doomed as a species to total extinction, and the length of their lifespan is directly proportionate to the time it takes for people to organize themselves on a massive scale and to move together to begin effective mass action, on every level, against the oinks in power. (continued on next page)

RPP POST 1978 ELECTION STATEMENT

PART II : FOUR MORE YEARS OF STRUGGLE!

continued from page 9

THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE

We believe with revolutionaries all over the world that the people and the people alone are the motive force in history, or the force which through its action brings about change, and that the reactionaries essentially react to the people's movement, always attempting to impose the past on the present through the most vicious and inhuman of means. We believe that it is up to the people what happens during the next four years of Nixon's regime and thereafter, and that Nixon and his ilk will remain in power precisely as long as the people let them get away with it, that is, precisely until the people organize themselves into a concentrated force which is capable of removing all such gangsters from positions of power and dismantling the entire machinery of power and greed they have constructed in the service of their own selfish interests.

We believe that people can organize themselves and can, when they're sufficiently organized and inspired, fight back against the octopus and imperialism to the point of kicking its ass, as the people of Vietnam and the people of China have done in the past twenty-five years. We believe that the example of the Vietnamese people, fighting for years years and years against the most monstrous military technology ever brought to bear against a people in human history, armed themselves with only primitive weaponry and whatever modern arms they could salvage from the wrecks of their aggressors' material, made powerful by their own organizational genius and the participation in the struggle of their entire people, stands as ample evidence that what we're talking about is not an impossibility by any means, and that the Vietnamese people have likewise laid out for us the correct method of struggle against an enemy so huge and ruthless as the U.S. government: the method of protracted struggle, organizing people everywhere, at every level, to resist the monster octopus, striking out as a unified and thoroughly organized force against its rampaging tentacles, marshalling every resource of the people - economic, political, and cultural - into the people's struggle for liberation from imperialist oppression.

We believe that this method of struggle, and the principles upon which it is based, are not only applicable to our situation here in Babylon USA but are actually demanded by the conditions under which all of us are forced to exist here in the home base of imperialism. And, what is more important, we believe that this method of struggle, carefully and correctly adapted to the concrete social conditions of the U.S., can and will bring about the necessary changes in the structure of our society which will remove the burden of an oppressive, exploitative, and increasingly obsolete capitalism (and its outgrowth, imperialism) from the backs of the people here in Babylon and all over the world.

What's more, we believe that only through pursuing this comprehensive strategy for a people's victory over a protracted period of time, moving systematically step-by-step to create, develop, consolidate and extend people's power in locality after locality until there is a vast transcontinental (and intercontinental) network of interdependent and interconnected people's institutions and communities working out of a common analysis and a common strategy for action-then and only then will we be able to deal effectively with the problem of removing the capitalists from their positions of economic, political and cultural power, and with the even greater problem of eliminating their inhuman economic, political and cultural institutions from the minds and lives of the people of the world who have been so severely burdened with this machinery of oppression and exploitation.

We believe that the people of the world are contained, as Huey P. Newton has said, within numerous oppressed (and less numerous liberated) communities across the planet, and that the oppression which is suffered by these captive communities has a common source in the capitalist clique which controls our own national community here in the U.S.A. We believe that these oppressed communities, each and every one of them, must and will inevitably gain their freedom from the iron clutches of the international vampires of imperialism, and that a victory for the people in any single community is a victory for all oppressed people, due to the nature of our common oppression and its common sourcepoint in the U.S. ruling clique.

We believe that the primary characteristic of all oppressed communities is the fact of their oppression by the imperialist gangsters; that this condition gives all of the oppressed communities around the world a commonality of purpose (to free themselves first of their oppression by outside imperialist elements and then of their oppression by imperialism as it works through international capitalism to exploit and oppress even those communities which have already managed to gain for themselves their national liberation); that their common oppression and their commonality of purpose provide an objective basis of unity upon which the struggling communities of the world can begin to erect, or to perfect, concrete structures for the establishment and development of intercommunalism, or the non-exploitative, anti-oppressive interaction and interrelation of communities everywhere; and that this basis of unity can only, and will only be strengthened by the successful practice of people in every oppressed community in the world working step by step to combat imperialism, in both its causes and its effects, everywhere and in every form in which it exists, with people in the many communities gaining inspiration and strength for their struggles from the scattered but increasing victories of peoples in other communities around the world.

We believe that, for example, the many small victories and the major overall victory of the people of Vietnam in their struggle against the full military might of the imperialist forces in their own community have had a direct effect on the struggles of people in the many various communities within the mother country itself; that these victories have provided people in this country with a tremendous inspiration and a clear cut mandate for emulation of the strategies and tactics which have brought about these victories; that the most effective form of support people in this country can provide the Vietnamese people is and other struggling peoples is to put into practice in their own communities the principles developed by their brothers and sisters who are struggling against imperialism in their communities; and that the victories we can achieve through applying these principles to our own condition here in the USA will likewise provide great inspiration to struggling peoples elsewhere and will add more and more fuel to the fire of international revolution which is threatening the very existence of the miniscule imperialist class of international vampires which is the sole remaining cause of the people's misery.

We believe that it is the task of conscious people in every oppressed community in this country - and particularly in the rainbow colony - to begin first to relate to the struggle of all oppressed people, including the oppressed peoples within the USA, as a common battle with a common purpose against a common enemy; second, to understand that resistance and initiative by the people are absolute necessities in every community on the planet, relative of course to the given conditions at any given stage of the development of that particular community and its relation to world historical development; third, to comprehend once and for all the conditions in this country and its many communities, at this particular stage of its development, and within the context of present world historical conditions (that is, within the contest of international revolution and the final collapsing stages of imperialist rules), are precisely those conditions which make resistance and initiative not only absolutely necessary but also absolutely possible in this time and space/place, that is, within the oppressed communities of Babylon USA in the year 1972-1973.

Fourth, we have to begin to understand that conditions are only states of existence, potentialities, givens - and that conditions change only when sufficient force is exerted by a sufficient body of people who are committed to change and to doing whatever is necessary to bring that change about. That is to say, the people as a mass will not change automatically or by magic, although the conditions which make change possible may be present in a given time and place; the mass changes bit by bit as its components, millions and millions of individuals and collectivities of individual persons, begin to change at the primary level, that is, where they live every day.

It is there, and only there, that the greater change - that of the mass - is made possible, and it is precisely there that any movement toward liberation and intercommunalism must both begin and end, or return. There is no abstract "community" which exists apart from the lives of people in their homes and workplaces; the struggle is everywhere all at once, the octopus has millions and millions of tentacles reaching down into the lives of every person on earth, there is no community which must not be liberated from its grasp and no community can be "free" until all the communities of people throughout the world are finally liberated from the slipping death-grip of the monstrous octopus of imperialism.

Conscious people everywhere must begin to organize first themselves, and then their communities (for the communities do not organize themselves without the consistent working involvement of a stable, wholly dedicated, practically experienced cadre of conscious community organizers who are committed to their communities without reservation for a protracted period of time), wherever they are, in every community in the entire country, in order to contribute in the most direct and finally the most effective fashion to the worldwide struggle against imperialist control of the planet. People must organize their communities, patiently and carefully and over a protracted period of time, into strong bastions of people's power, bases of struggle from which the decisive battle against the octopus of total control can finally be mounted and won.

People must organize their communities sector by sector, district by district, region by region, building upon each victory and evaluating each defeat so as to learn not to make the same mistakes again, drawing more and more elements of the people into the struggle with each public measure taken and each victory gained, consciously uplifting the level of the people's consciousness of and commitment to the struggle by carrying on consistent educational work and backing it up and illuminating the theory with exemplary practical actions, attacking the enemy system both by entering and transforming its corrupt, inhuman institutions and by creating and developing concrete alternatives to those structures in the form of people's institutions which will help sustain the people throughout their struggle and which will then completely replace the old institutions after the people's ultimate victory.

We must repeat that we believe without a doubt, based on our experience in our community here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that people in any community in the country, provided that they base themselves upon the principles of community organization outlined above, are capable of organizing themselves and moving in an organized fashion to deal directly with the oppressive conditions which obtain wherever they presently live, and that they can begin to make progress as a community toward the universal goal of liberation, self-determination, and intercommunalism precisely as rapidly as they embrace the correct method of struggle and begin to carry it out in practice in their own communities.

We believe further that the peoples of this country will not begin to make any effective progress against the imperialist system and its slimy components until the conscious elements in every given community accept and embrace correct methods of struggle, and that, for one immediate example, there will be no significant change in the results of the electoral struggle four years from now if people do not begin to move now, in an organized and thoroughly conscious manner, to build their many communities into local outposts of incipient people's power within a nation-wide (and trans-national) network of inter-connected people's organizations, institutions, and locally-based mass political movements.

We would also repeat once more our belief that people must organize in their communities along the lines of the problems the broad masses of the people face daily in their incessant struggle for survival, and particularly along the lines of the people's culture, or the complex of activities, attitudes and aspirations which informs - and which is finally - the life of the people in any given community. That is to say, any would-be mass movement in any given community which does not take the people's culture, or the day-to-day life of the people, fully into account, and which does not structure its policies and its programs into forms and other terms which the masses of the people can readily relate to, in terms of their own daily lives and their own bitter struggles for survival, is doomed to failure, no matter how exciting its possible temporary successes may be. A people's movement must be deeply and inextricably rooted in the culture of that people, in the people's daily lives and in the collective daily life of the people as a whole; nothing else can begin to qualify as a people's movement, no matter how noble its organizers' intentions may be.

A revolutionary movement, the kind of movement which is needed to remove Nixon and his entire class of superrich exploiters and oppressors of millions and millions of people all over the planet from their present position of power, must be a mass movement, involving hundreds of thousands (and ultimately millions) of people in its daily processes on the most basic and intimate levels. It must be capable of expressing the people's most basic interests in terms the people can easily understand and accept as their own, and it must become capable of representing the people's interests, in ways the people can understand and accept, during the course of the people's struggle to secure its needs (including liberation, self-determination, and intercommunalism) by organizing itself and moving in an organized manner to achieve its collective goals.

We firmly believe, on the basis of our collective experience of more than eight years' duration as rainbow community organizers, that as Mao Tse-tung has said, "the people have a potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism"; we believe just as firmly that this potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm can be activated among the people by presenting the people with concrete channels and courses of action through which they can move, individually and collectively, in a creative and constructive fashion, to express their incredible energy and their basic commitment to a higher form of human life than that which has been imposed on all of us by the dinosaurs of capitalism and imperialism.

We believe, finally, that the poor and oppressed peoples of the world can and will ultimately achieve their liberation from the forces of imperialism, creating in the process a non-exploitative, anti-oppressive, intercommunalist social system throughout the world which will replace all the institutions of capitalism and imperialism with people's communal institutions on every level, economic, political, and cultural. We believe that the poor and oppressed peoples within the confines of the so-called United States, including the people of the rainbow colony as well as the black, brown, yellow, red and the vast majority of white (Euro-American) peoples who likewise share no control over the means of production which shape and make possible our lives, not only must but can and will inevitably engage in mass struggle against the fueling forces of US imperialism in their local, regional, national and international manifestations; that their struggle will be ultimately victorious; and that it will progress just as rapidly as the conscious people in every community in the country begin to organize themselves and their communities to resist the foul strategies of the exploiters in every area of life and to begin to take the initiative against the greed creeps wherever and however they affect the people's lives, both by confronting and transforming the existing institutions of imperialist society as they extend into our communities and our lives, and by creating and developing alternative, communalist institutions which are capable increasingly of serving the needs of the people during every stage of their struggle.

We believe that there is an incipient mass revolutionary movement straining to be born into this time and space; that it manifests itself most obviously in the ever-increasing social consciousness of the people of this country as a whole; and that it is the absence of stable, thoroughly committed, wholly dedicated, practically experienced, class-conscious organizations of community organizers who are ready to work in whatever ways necessary and for a protracted period of time to develop the potential strength of their communities and of the people as a whole which prevents for the time being the emergence of such a mass revolutionary movement among the masses of the American people.

Our interpretation of the results of the November 7th elections, both national and local, is based in this analysis, and our conclusions concerning those results have been drawn in its light. We believe that the general electorate on the national level, both by the outright refusal of almost half its numbers to even participate through voting in the corrupt bourgeois political process, and by the delivery of almost 40% of those votes which were cast in the election to George McGovern (a choice of sorts which was in no way available in the 1968 electoral contest), has demonstrated a significant advancement in its social and political consciousness as compared to that of four years ago, and that this obvious advancement is the primary factor which must be considered for the future in terms of the strategies and tactics to be developed in the course of the next four years of the people's struggle for liberation self-determination, and intercommunalism.

We believe that the people's consciousness must be systematically heightened, through education and instructive action, and that the people of every community in this country must be systematically organized into a powerful mass political movement which will be capable not only of forcing greater exposures and greater risks on the part of the imperialists in the next election, resulting in the defeat of the most rabidly reactionary faction of the ruling class, but also of building increasingly effective people's power in many localities during the course of the four years between now and 1976. Struggle has been on the people's agenda increasingly over the past few years the next four demand its accession to the top of the list, and will undoubtedly witness its steady expansion into more and more sectors of the population.

(Caption image)

This North Vietnamese irrigation canal was clogged: lacking machinery, hundreds of men and women dug away the mud with their hands.