The World Could Be Radically Different & It’s Time We Start Talking About Real Change

Sunday,
August 24, at the Cleo Parker Robinson Theater in Denver, 300 people
gathered to hear speeches by prominent representatives of the movements
against the war, repression, and torture of the Bush regime. The
following is an edited transcript of a talk given by Sunsara Taylor at
this Evening of Conscience.

I want to
start by giving everyone who came out and protested today a shout out.
People had to go up against a lot and this needs to be appreciated.
There was the “freedom cages” with barbed wire that the police built
for the protesters, the storm troopers in the streets, there was all
the media hype about protesters being dangerous. And then there is all
the Obama hype (the Obama “hope”) that is being built up and that
people are being sucked into. To go out in the face of that and to
stand true to principle, against the war, against theocracy, against
everything this Bush program has brought, and everything that Obama is
not challenging, is very courageous and very heroic and very precious.

At
the same time, our numbers were smaller than they need to be, than they
should have been and than many of us were hoping they”d be. I want to
talk bluntly and honestly about this and what we should make of this. I
write for Revolution newspaper and this is something I”ve
been writing about. I did an article recently, “The Dangerous Logic of
Blocking Protests in the Name of Getting Obama Elected.” This has been
going on. People maybe have heard some of the groups talk about having
an “inside/outside strategy.” As World Can’t Wait was working to help
build these protests we talked to a lot of people who said, “Oh yeah,
we”re glad you”re organizing street protests against a new war on Iran,
against the war in Iraq. We”ll be there too-and we”ll be doing our inside strategy.” That is, trying to influence the Democratic Party from within the convention and by appealing to delegates.

But
in reality what’s been happening is that a lot of these so-called
“anti-war” groups and “anti-war” leaders have been demobilizing
protest. They have been working on their “inside strategy” but they
have done nothing to mobilize protests out in the streets to oppose
this direction that can be seen by the world.

I
know Recreate “68 had to go up against this. I’m going to be really
blunt because it matters. United for Peace and Justice, Leslie Cagan,
she said maybe we should call off the protest today and advocated
instead that we should mingle with the delegates. I’m all for going and
talking to delegates”in order to get them to join us in the streets, okay? But Code Pink, Progressive Democrats of America, where were they today?

A
lot of people are deeply angered and are getting disaffected with
Barack Obama. Why? Like Jeremy [Scahill] just said, Obama is not an
anti-war candidate. He wants to send ten thousand more troops to
Afghanistan. He threatened nuclear weapons against Iran repeatedly. He
threatened to go unilaterally into Pakistan. That’s not an anti-war
candidate. He voted for Bush’s FISA bill to legalize massive spying on
the American population and render retroactive immunity to everybody
who broke the law in the Bush administration and in the telecom
industry so that people will never know how far that crime went. This
is a man who has come out and said that he wants to expand Bush’s
Faith-Based programs. We have a move toward theocracy in this country,
and he wants to expand the Faith-Based program. We have a
fascist assault on women’s reproductive rights-the right to abortion,
the right to birth control-and he’s saying what? “We have to reduce
abortions. We have to seek common ground.” He’s featuring Bob Casey, a
fanatical anti-abortion candidate, to speak at the DNC. These are the
reasons people are growing disaffected with Barack Obama. Frankly it’s
a good thing, but it’s not enough.

I want to say something else, because this has had a real impact. We have to confront this. The Nation
came out with an open letter to Barack Obama. And a lot of very
courageous people who have rightfully earned the respect of the people
for their stands against the war and the Bush program signed this
letter and this was a mistake and it’s done harm. This letter says,
among other things, that there are many, many people who gave grown
alienated from politics-as-usual who have found hope again in Barack
Obama, and the letter casts this as a good thing. This is not a good
thing. People are right to get disaffected. The question is not how do
we get people to believe and how do we use our anti-war credentials to
make Barack Obama more palatable. The question is, how do we go out to
people and tell them the truth about what it’s really going to take to
stop all the things that made them alienated in the first place.

Including
the fact that Obama is not going to stop this program. Sure, he’s
different in some flavors or varieties than McCain. I’m not contesting
that. But those differences are about how to run an empire, that’s what
he’s auditioning to do. And it’s time for people to confront this
reality. We do not bridge this gap by going with the grain, appealing
to the false hope that he’s capturing people in. We deal with this by
going against the grain, by telling people the truth that they need to
hear: that Obama doesn’t represent the change you need, he represents
the change that the system will allow you to believe in.

We
have to be out there in the streets. This is why I think it’s so
important what people did today and why we need to persevere in this.
There is nobody up in the halls of power listening. There is no referee
up there. There is nobody saying, “What does the public really want;
let me give that expression.” This is the dictatorship of a ruling
class of a capitalist system. And the only people who are going to stop
this program are people who are going to go in the face of that, who
are going to work outside of official politics, who are going to go
outside of the mainstream, who are going to go into the streets, who
are going to shut down their campuses, who are going to blow the
whistle in defiance of the halls of power, who are going to risk all
the things they are bringing down on journalists now who report the
truth, who are going to pass resolutions in their professional
organizations that they won’t participate in torture, that they won’t
go along with spying and covering up-people who are going to risk
something.

I know a lot of people got
demoralized. They think protest doesn’t work, that maybe this is
unrealistic. But look, there is nothing less realistic than thinking
that somebody in one of these two parties or in this whole framework is
going to listen.

It is on us.

Yes,
this is harder. It is riskier. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to confront
this. But, frankly, it’s uncomfortable to have your home raided, to
have your sons dragged out in Iraq, to have them rounded up and
disappeared, to have five million people displaced. Nobody asked them,
O.K.? Nobody asked the people in New Orleans if they were going to be
displaced while they are standing on rooftops and George Bush is making
jokes. And they take troops off on rescue missions and send them in
with orders to shoot to kill. That’s what this government did.

And
if you want this to stop, you have to take it upon yourself, we have to
take it upon ourselves, and, yes, there is risk involved.

But
if you look back in history and you look at what happened in Nazi
Germany, how people went along with one outrage after another and they
got cowed and intimidated. Pastor Martin Niemoeller came out after
that. He’s the one who said, “First they came for the communists, and I
didn’t speak up” Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up”
and by the time they came for me there was no one left.” That’s his
most famous quote and I think it’s very relevant now. But he also said
something else which I think is worth upholding. He said, look, if we
had stood up when it was still early enough, while we still had our
convictions, while we still had the ability to do so, perhaps 30,000
people would have been rounded up or killed, but think about what we
would have stopped.

I’m not going to prettify
this. We are in the belly of an empire. It is committing war crimes and
crimes against humanity. They have legalized torture and both parties,
the whole system, is involved in that. History is going to judge us by
how we act.

If your allegiance to the Democratic
Party is bigger than your allegiance to the people of the world then
you have foreclosed your right to call yourself an “anti-war leader.”
[applause]

I really want to say this because I
know it can be demoralizing. We can hype ourselves and say, “Oh, we
were really militant out there…” And we were and it was righteous.
But I don’t want to hype us. We are smaller than we need to be. But
here, right now, it matters a lot if we get demoralized or if we get
firmer in our conviction. The fact that we are smaller means that there
is more responsibility on our shoulders. We are still right and there
are still tens of millions of people in this country who do not want to
live in a new Rome, who do not want to live in a torture state. They
may be deluded right now by Barack Obama, by the illusion that they are
going to get change through this election. And this may be being
facilitated by a huge section-and it’s an embarrassment-of the anti-war
movement and the so-called pro-choice movement and you name it. This
may be being facilitated but those people are disaffected and the
reality will assert itself whether Barack becomes president and
escalates this war, whether McCain becomes president and people feel
that their hopes were dashed, there are going to be people looking to
what comes next. And they are either going to get demoralized and
paralyzed-or they will get radicalized and active. And the difference
between the two depends disproportionately on what we are doing now.
Whether we tone it down and half-step on the truth of things, or
whether we”re going in the face of people’s illusions and telling the
truth about what it’s really going to take, the kind of struggle and
sacrifice, and yes, upheaval, it takes to change the course of history.

I
really want to encourage people to not lose our bearings. This is a
time for strategic nerve, for bold truth-telling, for going out to the
people in a mass way, not being intimidated or disoriented by all the
hype that’s going on for Obama, or by our small numbers.

This is a time to get more radical.

I
want to talk about this for just a minute. They try and scare people
when they talk about radicals-“Oh the radicals”” Radical just means
getting to the root. It means you”re not just dealing with the symptoms
any more, you”re dealing with the root of the problem. I think it says
something about American culture that they try and scare you with the
idea of being radical. That’s a problem. [Applause]

It’s
not just this election and it’s not just these candidates, although it
is, and this is a historic moment. Elections in this country-we live in
a capitalist society-and elections are controlled by the bourgeoisie,
by the rulers. They are not the means through which decisions are made.
That’s why they give you two options to continue the war. Elections are
not how decisions get made. They are primarily for the purpose
of channeling people’s political energies, confining them, and running
them into the ground. And they are a way that whoever becomes president
is able to claim a mantle of legitimacy, of a popular mandate, so when
they do their crimes people think, “Oh, maybe I’m the only one,
everybody else supported them.” It’s a way to confuse people. It’s a
trap. It’s a bamboozlement. And it’s time to get very radical and look
at how it’s rooted in a system and we actually need a different system.
We need a different world. We need a revolution. [Applause]

A
lot of people say, “You guys criticize and criticize but what would you
do instead?” I’m a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party and I
am very proud to say that the Revolutionary Communist Party just
published its new Constitution. We communists don’t just want to
criticize. We want state power. We know we could run things far better
if we had state power in our hands. I invite people to get your hands
on this and engage this. We need a radical solution. We need a new
world. We need socialism. We need communism. And if we had state power
there would not be imperialist wars. There would not be an epidemic of
police murder-twelve men shot in four weeks by the Chicago P.D., not to
mention Sean Bell, Amadou, the names and the tears and the outrage goes
on and on. To be a young Black man in this country in 2008 is to have a
target on your back. How much longer is this going to go on? If we had
state power, that’s over. No longer a situation where half of humanity,
women, are terrorized walking down the street and the most dangerous
place in their lives is in their own homes. A quarter of women will be
raped during their lives. This is a sick system and we need a different
world. [Applause]

We need a whole different
culture. Think about the energy, the creativity, the audacity that
young people get into and they endlessly come up with new cultural
expressions and then how-because of this system and the culture it
gives rise to-all this gets twisted into new ways to degrade women or
get over on somebody else. It doesn’t have to be this way. If people
could live differently, and I think you see this all the time, bursting
up against the constraints of this system. You see it in the songs that
don’t get played on the radio. And you see it in the people trying to
become teachers in the inner cities. You see people trying to become
doctors to spread HIV medication around the world. But they”re up
against the fact that the system is bigger and the problem is bigger.
But if you had revolutionary state power all of that could be given the
backing of the state. It could be unleashed. People could live a
different way.

Or think of what it means that in
the face of massive intimidation, of all the repression and the
legalization of torture and all this “watch what you say” that’s coming
down, that people go out in the face of this anyway, not just for their
own narrow self interest, but because they care about the lives of
people in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Palestine. People they have
never met. That’s a sentiment that a lot of people share, deep in their
hearts, and we can bring to the surface and if we had state power, you
would not be caged for giving that expression. That would be given the
backing of the state. We would open the airwaves to dissent and debate.

The
world could be radically different and it’s time we start talking about
real change, fundamental change, radical change. We”re doing a program
on Wednesday night at the Unitarian Church at 7 pm on the Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
I invite everybody to come out to it and engage in this discussion and
to talk about how we”re going to really bring about a different world.
And for people, whether you”re ready to get with that, to debate that,
or if you”re not ready for that, we are going to be in the streets with
people, this week all week long and going forward.

And
all of us-we all have to go back where we”re from and not lose our
bearings and go and challenge people because history will pivot on what
we do.

So I want to give another shout out to
everybody here. It can seem like the storm has blown over, that maybe
Americans have calmed down, that maybe the world has settled in, and
that it’s all supposed to end with Barack, but that’s not the reality.
In reality we”re likely to be at the eye of the storm and bigger storms
are coming and what we do in this period really matters.