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Happy Bastille Day!

by Steven Argue
[Painting: Charles Thévenin - La prise de la Bastille, painted 1793]
800_charle_1.jpg
Happy Bastille Day!

On the morning of July 14th 1789 the medieval prison and fortress called the Bastille was stormed and prisoners released. This happened at the opening of the French Revolution (1789-1814) which brought an end to the reign of Louis XVI and ushered in the bourgeois revolution in France.

Today, the capitalist state of the United States carries out the mass incarceration of the poor for both purposes of corrupt profits made from privately owned prisons and their purposes of repressive intimidation, driving fear into the working class and poor who know they won't get a fair trial because they can't afford expensive lawyers and don't stand a chance inside an entire system that is stacked against us. At the heart of the capitalist state is its prisons, courts, cops, military, and secret police. The storming of the Bastille represents the only possible form of "workers’ control" of the repressive apparatus of the existing state–i.e., smashing it utterly.

This is a goal of the Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Party, join our discussions on FB:
http://www.facebook.com/steven.argue.1#!/groups/RevolutionaryTendency/
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