By Toussaint L’Ouverture

You will stop killing us. This is the slogan of the mass movement in Saint Louis that has grown around the struggle against police murder, gentrification, and various other forms of capitalist-imperialist violence that has reignited after the September 15th not-guilty finding for killer pig Jason Stockley. When we say it, we mean it. The blood of countless martyrs, from Darren Seals to Mike Brown, Vonderrit Myers to Kiwi Herring, flows within us, building anger and outrage. We have attracted notoriety country and worldwide for the heroic displays of struggle that have been a hallmark of this city since 2014, inspiring a new generation of revolutionaries from Baltimore to Philadelphia to Chicago. If you are a Communist in the United States in the year 2017, especially an organized one, you went through the Ferguson struggle in some way, shape or form. If you’re a member of Revolutionary Action — STL, you are a direct product of the Ferguson movement, because our organization is a direct development of what was once just a scattered group of youth that attended the many mass demonstrations of that time. Since then, in the span of just under two years, we have grown into the largest revolutionary organization in this city. How? Through mass work, revolutionary propaganda, firm discipline, practicing the mass line method of leadership, constant reorientation and learning through practice, and development of our ideology. Most importantly, putting it into practice. Practice, theory, practice. This is how movements develop, this is how humans get knowledge. We do, we look at what we’ve done, we criticize, it, and we do it again, constantly getting better and better. Theory is just practice summed up and written down. We are guided by our revolutionary elders and history who made successful revolutions.

Just like our city has inspired people world and countrywide, we realize that we also stand on the shoulders of giants. Specifically, we stand on the shoulders of two world historic revolutions and socialist projects that shook the face of the earth in the 20th century, freeing countless billions from imperialism, feudalism, and sellout capitalism. The first was the Great October Revolution of 1917, which took place 100 years ago this November 7th. On that day, the Provisional Government of Russia was overthrown by the masses, led by the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, later renamed Leningrad, was stormed and the ministers of that useless government were placed under arrest. This was followed by a Civil War between various reactionary elements (Whites), backed by imperialists that had invaded the country and sought to restore the old Tsarist order, and the revolutionary forces (Reds). The Reds were victorious, due to their superior Party and organizational discipline, the ability to adapt to changing conditions, adherence to revolutionary principles, and the conscious activity and organization of the revolutionary masses and support of freedom loving people worldwide. This revolution directly inspired the second world historic revolution, that of the Chinese people, led by their party under the stewardship of Chairman Mao Zedong, which saw military victory over the reactionary Kuomintang in 1949. These revolutions were world-historic because their lessons, the decades of struggle, and the subsequent construction of socialism produced lessons that, theoretically summed up and synthesized along with those of revolutions that are still ongoing, are universal. These revolutions and processes produced the theory and practice that makes up Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the most developed form of Marxism. To be a Marxist today, to uphold and inherit the Bolshevik Revolution, means to be a Maoist. MLM was synthesized as such beginning in the Philippines with the re-establishment of their Communist Party in 1968, led by young comrades, among them Jose Maria Sison, who organized the new party on a firm theoretical basis, taking lessons from the Chinese Revolution and repudiating social-imperialism and modern revisionism that had captured and destroyed many previously revolutionary Communist Parties. The people’s war launched by this party and continuing today, one of the most advanced in the world, will seize power in the Philippines. Duterte is doomed because he dares to fight Maoists. The development of MLM continued with the development of the Peruvian revolution, led by Abimael Guzman (Chairman Gonzalo) and the Communist Party of Peru. The CPP forcefully presented, showed, and defended the universality of Protracted People’s War, the necessity of cultural revolution, the baselessness of electoral politics in a bourgeois-reactionary system (the people’s war in Peru began in 1980 with the burning of ballot boxes) and the necessity to develop the three magic weapons (the Party, the United Front, and the People’s Army). The Peruvian revolution was derailed by the capture of Gonzalo by CIA trained government agents and the subsequent splitting of the party. We learn and study the lessons of this defeat to prevent their being remade, and make criticisms and reject certain elements based on the inapplicability to our current situation in the US, but firmly uphold the theoretical foundations of MLM produced by the Peruvian Communist Party. We also uphold the ongoing struggle of the Indian Revolution being led by the CPI-Maoist, the renewed Nepalese Revolution opposed to the capitulation of the renegade Prachanda, and the struggle being waged by comrades in Turkey against the fascist Erdogan. Around the world today, the only people who consciously and actively are transforming the world in the method of the Bolsheviks are Maoists. Others play at it. We do it.

The spirit of 1917 lives within us because we consciously uphold and apply the lessons that Comrades Lenin, Stalin, and other revolutionary heroes of that era learned through decades of revolutionary struggle and practice. While others try to drag the name of the Bolshevik Party and its heroes, Lenin and Stalin, through the mud, calling them “dictators” and trying to rehabilitate various revisionist elements, deviationists, and opportunists such as Trotsky, Maoists uphold the true Bolsheviks. Those who did the damn thing. Those who rejected the fake and upheld the real. Who defeated fascism? Who laid the foundations for the socialist USSR to provide a happy life for its people, inspiring several black revolutionaries in the US to visit and even settle while we were being lynched in Mississippi and Alabama? Was it Trotsky, the opportunist in exile, or was it Stalin? Did Du Bois eulogize Stalin, or did he eulogize Trotsky? Judge for yourself who was correct.

The Bolshevik Revolution wasn’t just one day. It was a process that began decades before, with constant setbacks. Revolution isn’t a straight line, it has constant ebbs and flows, twists and turns. A revolutionary can’t get disenchanted and angry when the masses don’t turn out in the streets with weapons ready to throw down. A revolutionary can’t be afraid of being unpopular with the various reformist and phony socialist elements that have media presence and support from such liberal rags as Jacobin. A revolutionary can’t be afraid of prison nor death, because we know that in the end 100 more comrades will come to pick up our red flag. Who are the real inheritors of the October Revolution? Are they the liberals with red icing who denounce actual Communist theory and practice as “doctrinaire” while pursuing, dogmatically, reformist, electoral dead ends, quibbling over this and that new law and crying to the heavens when some bullshit candidate is defeated? Of course not. To see the real spirit of 1917, look to those who consistently uphold the Bolshevik spirit of discipline, struggle in the face of adversity, unwillingness to deviate or waver from what has scientifically been determined to be right and true. Look to our comrades in the Philippines who have been waging struggle since the era of the fascist Marcos and continue to do so in the era of the neo-fascist Duterte. Look to the Black Panther Party, who learned from Mao, who learned from Lenin. Look to who upholds the gun and scorns the ballot as where political power comes from. Everybody pays lip service. Look to who puts words and theory into action. Look at who dares to storm the gates of heaven. There is the 1917 spirit. Like I said in the beginning, you will stop killing us, because Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Sison, Gonzalo, Mazumdar, Kaypakkaya, Ho Chi Minh, Newton, and countless nameless martyrs taught us how to kill you. Whether it happens 5 years from now or 500, we will win. Not because we believe, but because we know.

Toussaint L’Ouverture is an angry history student who wears good shoes.