General By Bertolt Brecht
GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and
crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect: It needs a driver.
General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, a human is very useful.
They can fly and they can kill.
But they have one defect:
They can think.
A New Direction
A New Direction
A-cross the 4 cardinal signs
And spanning space and time
We connect
From the North to the South Pacific
Our reality couldn’t be more horrific
As the banker’s solution to the heating planet
Is going from gas to electric
Creating a whole new craze for deep sea mining
Seeking maximum profits in the drilling
For lithium, copper, cobalt, and zinc
Sacrificing our ecology for their economy
In a race to the bottom-
Causing irreversible global warming
And inevitable global warring.
To the Midwest
Like the chemical spill that made a town ill
From a derailed train in East Palestine, Ohio
To Dexter Reed whose life was stolen
With 100 shots fired by 5 racist cops in Chicago
To the Middle East,
The Gaza strip, the shape of Dexter’s body
If we traced him as he lay prostrate and lifeless
Riddled with torn flesh and blood spilt
Like a trainwreck across the pavement
With 3 decades of police killings
Condensed into a few months
By US-made Israeli bullets, tanks and bombardments
Over 35 thousand Palestinian workers
2/3 of them women and children murdered
It’s no longer ethereal but becoming clear
Capitalism’s need to control labor,
Trade routes and petroleum
Is laid bear
And folks are beginning to see
That even Democrats can be Nazi’s
And that what we need
Is a new direction
Beyond the 2 parties
Voting “uncommitted”
in the bosses’ elections
Witnessing Jewish join Arab
Healthcare and Labor
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - Act Up
Standing up with college students in standoffs
From east to west do you see?
From Columbia and Harvard to Cal Poly, SC and the UCs
Not afraid of campus cops, Zionist fascists or being dox’d
Recognizing our collective humanity
And fighting with multiracial unity
Is nothing short of awe-inspiring
And yet the actuality of that potential
Is still scattered and splintered
Spinning like a compass rose that cannot find its pole
Because we have yet to strike at its center!
Without developing communist consciousness
And building a revolutionary party - PLP
This movement can only be- static
Trapped in a loop like an electric circuit
Still hopeful about capitalism’s electoral circus
Confusing sunrise with sunset
Like the fake new dawn of the DSA or Cornel West
And most dangerously
A river and sea of Palestinian flags
Just like the American or Zionist
National Liberation in ALL its iterations has failed our class
Confined within the border walls of nationalism and capitalism
And currently caught up in the whims of reforms
With it all threatened to be blown away
In the winds of war
So we as communists across all continents
From ALL the rivers and ALL the seas
To even the outermost atmosphere
We must enter into their darkest depths without fear
Because even with their latest war machines
From Artificial Intelligence, drones
Satellites and Stealth submarines
As Communist poet, Bertolt Brecht, said
All of their tech has “one defect”
It requires a worker to collaborate
Against our core interests
And WE can think!
So let us fight alongside our electrified class
And strike like crosshairs
Through the building of the Progressive Labor Party
And let us recognize and sharpen this dialectic
Exposing and connecting the two forces
Colliding and pulling away into in an ellipse
So that we can break this cycle
Once and for all
With communist revolution!
