I walked through UCLA early Thursday morning, the night after the police onslaught on the student encampment protesting against the genocidal U.S.-Israeli war against Palestine. I looked over the ruins for a few minutes on a deserted campus that had been so unusually vibrant and engaged for the past week but that was now deserted. The whole scene, with cops stomping around the place after they had mass-arrested the students a few hours earlier, infuriated me.  

At the same time, it called to mind and drove home what Bob Avakian (BA) said in a very different—but in a deeper way very similar—context many years ago, also addressing the armed enforcers of this system and their masters: 

If you can't handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome.

In that quote, BA is responding to a case of murderous pigs once again wantonly killing a young Black person—in this case Tyisha Miller, a Black woman who was passed out in her car. BA goes on to say what we would do if we had state power and confronted that situation. (Go here to read the whole quote and watch "Bob Avakian on the People's Security After the Revolution".) 

Was it a “stretch” for me to think about this quote while I looked at the rubble of the encampment? Not really. For we are talking about the same system—with the same interests, outlook, methods, and goals and the same brutal pigs who enforce it all—that murdered Tyisha Miller and that is indeed committing genocide in Gaza. 

But think about a different system: one based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. Leave aside for now the fact that this constitution expressly forbids “all wars of aggression and domination, and all occupation of other countries in pursuit of such domination and aggression.” If a group of students were to peacefully camp out to rebel against any particular policy of the school, the government or even socialism as a whole, we would welcome the chance to get into it, to debate it out, to win people in the debate and more broadly to a deeper understanding through the back-and-forth… and, to the extent we might be wrong or at least missing something important about reality, to learn from it. It might not be easy—it’ll probably be messy as hell—but through the course of this debate and struggle, the understanding of the people in society as a whole would deepen, and you would ultimately come out of the struggle with the masses of people having a stronger, more conscious grip on state power.

So FUCK these current rulers and their smug and hypocritical talk of “freedom of thought”—“freedom” which runs right up against a billy club when they view their fundamental interests as being threatened. We could—and we very urgently need to—get to something that is totally different and worthy of human beings. To quote WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM:

The purpose of the educational system in this new socialist society will be to enable people to pursue the truth wherever it leads, with a spirit of critical thinking and scientific curiosity, and in this way to continually learn about the world and be better able to contribute to changing it in accordance with the fundamental interests of humanity.

To get to that world, we need a revolution… nothing less.