"The world could be radically different and it's time we start talking about real change"

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.

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