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We all saw the police riot on the May 1st march at MacArthur Park. Battalions of armed police clubbed and shot their way through an immigrants' rights rally. Hundreds of LAPD cops, in full riot gear, wielded batons and fired volley after volley of rubber bullets directly at children, women and men. Cops pointed their shotguns point blank at people’s faces. Parents tried to shield their children from “non-lethal” missiles that could crack a baby’s skull. Numerous people were injured.

Journalists were viciously attacked. A camerawoman from the local Fox News, Channel 11, was beaten. When her colleague tried to help her, she too was grabbed, spun around, and threatened with arrest. Others had their cameras taken by the police and smashed. This was meant to intimidate reporters and prevent the truth from being told about the real conditions, demands and struggles of the immigrant masses. This action speaks volumes about the much touted “freedoms” in this country – including the so-called “free press.”

The brutal police attack was clearly unprovoked. Police and their apologists have tried to justify this as a response to “agitators.” This is a bald lie. This rally had a permit to be in the park until 9 PM (the police raid came around 6 PM – only an hour after the rally began). The real “provocation” was that immigrants and their allies came out in the tens of thousands to rally and demand that immigrants be treated as human beings. This brutality is a critical part of U.S. imperialism’s program for immigrants: killed at the border, worked to death like slaves, Gestapo-style ICE raids with la migra dragging people out of their homes in the middle of the night, deportations and tearing families apart, terrorizing communities with street sweeps, concentration camps for captured immigrants including children, and armed vigilantes hunting down immigrants like modern day slave catchers.

A large number of people – protesters, reporters and legal observers from the rally – have come out to expose this and condemn this police attack. Police Chief Bratton and city officials have been quick to try to cover it up with more lies and excuses.

The police attack on the May 1st rally came on the heels of the 15th anniversary of the 1992 Rodney King rebellion, when immigrants joined Black people in a powerful uprising in protest against police brutality. We have been told repeatedly since, that the LAPD has been reformed. This IS the reformed LAPD – the meaner and more brutal machine that we saw on May 1st.

Despite all the bills in Congress, all of which are bad and unacceptable, and numerous elected Latino politicians, this police attack reveals the reality of “comprehensive immigration reform.” It reveals the heart of what the government has in store for immigrants – police raids, deportations and attempts to crush resistance. What does this say about the times in which we live?

Let’s be clear. They don’t have a solution to what they call the “immigration problem.” The U.S. imperialists rape and pillage the world for profit. They tear up, warp and destroy the economies of whole countries, leaving millions of people to starve and die or seek work wherever and however they can in the world. The 12 to 20 million undocumented workers estimated to be in the U.S. have been driven into this country by the heartless workings of capitalism and imperialism. And when they get to the US, they are worked to death, dehumanized and demonized, and blamed for just about every problem in the society. In reality, the U.S. economy would collapse without super-exploited immigrant labor. Ruthless exploitation of immigrant workers is critical to the functioning of the American imperialist economy; it depends on the enslavement of millions of immigrants. It’s part of the DNA of their system. The truth rings out powerfully, we don’t have an immigration problem; we have a capitalist/imperialist problem.

In the face of this police assault and all the attacks on immigrants today, it is critical that all of us who care about justice and the future do everything we can to unite all of the oppressed and exploited people with all those who hate what this system does. We must, in revolutionary unity, defeat all the ways the system is going after immigrants. Make this part of and contribute to uniting millions in a common revolutionary cause against a common enemy and declaring, in one voice, diverse in language and accent, but fully united in its sentiment: “We are human beings, we demand a better world, we will not accept slavery in any form.”

We all know that the world should not be this way. And moreover, it doesn’t have to be this way. We need a whole new world, a communist world, and a socialist revolution to get us there. And this is very, very possible. We need a world where people work together with equality and dignity, a world without borders to enforce the domination and looting of entire nations, in fact a world without nations, a world without men oppressing women, a world without anyone being “illegal,” a world free of every form of oppression and exploitation.

The world and everyone in it is at a crossroads where we are staring at both unprecedented danger and perhaps historic opportunity. In this kind of situation we can get to this new world, but we need a revolution to get there and we need leadership. That leadership is Bob Avakian. He has dedicated his life to mapping out the path to that revolution and how to get to a better world in which we would all want to live. And more than that, Bob Avakian has taken up the critical questions of how to build this better world once we win a revolution, building on the positive achievements in the Soviet Union and China when they were socialist, while criticizing the mistakes, sometimes very big, that were made, to re-envision a model for a vibrant, creative and thriving society. He is leading an organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party, that is dedicated to bringing about a revolution and a whole new world.

Again, we and the world are at a crossroads. The type of world we get beyond this crossroads depends upon what we do. If you are serious about changing the world, about bringing a better world into being, you need to check out and get into the works of Bob Avakian, follow his leadership and support and join the Revolutionary Communist Party. The future is at stake.

Libros Revolución, 312 W. 8th St., Los Angeles, CA (213) 488-1303

Stop and reverse the militarization of the border.
Full rights and access to decent education, health care, and other social services.
No deportations, no round-ups, no detention centers/concentration camps.

We are human beings. We demand a better world. We will not accept slavery in any form.

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