Revolution, Part 1: Thoughts on the Word REVOLUTION

In my next reflection I’ll get into: why we need a socialist revolution, nothing less; what it means to say communist revolution; & why socialist revolution must be communist-led and communist in orientation. I’m guessing it will take me a third reflection to finish my thoughts on this topic. As will surprise nobody who has been following me, what I say here is influenced by what I have learned in recent years from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and its leader Bob Avakian —the guy who gets so many “left intellectuals” seeing red (indeed!) with their undies so tied up in a bunch that they get all snarky and mean isnetad of actually engaging with his work :) At the same time, much of what I have so far learned from Revcoms and Avakian resonates with my own background in classic Marxism – a background that goes back to my days as an undergraduate at the “little red schoolhouse on the prairie”: the once half-Marxist history department of Northern Illinois University of the late 1970s. The Western rich/“core”-state bias was strong in that department but far from 100% thanks to the Sovet historian Al Resis, the Chinese historian Jim Shirely, the great Latin American historian Ben Keen, and some super readings on the Chinese Revolution in Margaret George’s course “The History of Modern Revolutions.”