Raising my voice for workers in Gaza and for May Day

I spoke at a Rutgers University action in Camden, where students took over the Campus Center, demanding that Rutgers’ Board of Governors break ties with Israel. One student condemned Rutgers for being the largest university in New Jersey, while homeless and drug-addicted workers sleep below train stations in New Brunswick, where their main campus is located. Still, solving the homeless and addiction crises are not priorities of capitalist rulers of the academy. Rutgers President Johathan Holloway, a self-proclaimed Civil Rights scholar is instead partnering with Tel Aviv University to build a $665 million ‘Hub’ that will include cybersecurity research. This contradiction, highlighted by the students, resonated with me as a worker in the city of Newark. I work as a nonprofit worker, where the push for community development is explicitly advertised to Black and Latin workers as a solution to crumbling infrastructure and super-exploitation.

I shared with the students that the same night that students were demanding a ceasefire, workers who live in an apartment complex, Georgia King Village, owned by a ‘community developer,’ L+ M, were crying out to the multicultural City Council and Black liberal Mayor Ras Baraka about deteriorating housing conditions. These workers were met with empty promises by their city councilman to regulate developers while in the next breath, the council voted to give L+ M another 30-year tax abatement. 

At the same time that we’re fighting against racist displacement in Gaza, workers are also fighting against racist displacement in Newark. All over, the ones we’re fighting against are liberal servants of capitalism and imperialism and we need worker-student unity to win! I ended with the chant that PL’ers  out at a Newark city council meeting remixed from ‘No good politician in a racist system’ to ‘No good President in a racist institution!’ 

I also used this action as a chance to bond with a friend who is active in fights for a ceasefire in the surrounding suburbs of Newark. On the ride back, I asked them what they thought of the action and communist politics. They shared, “I think communism is most aligned with my politics, but I don’t know enough about it.” I shared CHALLENGE and the book that our club is reading, History of the U.S.S.R. by Andrew Rothstein. I also invited them to march with us on May Day.

This struggle is exposing our class’s potential to wage a militant, multiracial, internationalist class war against the bosses, but we have to be in it to win it! The fight for communist revolution continues.
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My first PL workshop: ‘I felt heard’

Even though I wouldn’t consider myself a beginner to communist theory if I’m being honest, I was still pretty anxious about attending a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) workshop for the first time. In addition to me generally being an anxious person, it’d also be my first time attending any sort of communist collective, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Maybe I’d be too far behind in my knowledge about communism, and I’d end up not having anything to add to the discussion. Maybe I’d be unknowingly too reformist, so even if I did attempt to add something to the discussion, it wouldn’t be worthwhile at all, or it’d just end up being completely regressive. 

In actuality though, my interaction with the PLP was nothing like my apprehensions. All its members were extremely kind and welcoming. Rather than feeling talked down to during our discussion, I played an active role in it, and I felt that my ideas were truly being heard and engaged with. In one workshop, titled, “Why Communism, Why PLP?”, we critiqued a quote by Jay-Z, underscoring its attempt to conflate radical racial progress with upward class mobility within capitalism’s inherently oppressive hierarchy. We also discussed what communism meant to us personally as people from a diverse set of backgrounds, and (re)affirmed that a more equitable, communist future could only be done through a grassroots revolution by the global working classes, and not through superficial reforms by the ruling classes. 

This is a collective that I’d keep returning to. I loved that, in addition to analyzing work by Marxist theorists, we also analyzed media and media figures that are more prolific within mainstream culture. This cultural analysis demonstrated that capitalism implicitly undergirds a large swath of the media we consume and that consumption done uncritically is bound to be accompanied by an uncritical acceptance of the oppressive ideologies and material conditions that said media is silently reproducing. Furthermore, what this cultural analysis also indicates is that, in spite of attempts by the ruling class to suppress it, resistance to capitalism, and a pursuit of communism, pervade and continue to accumulate within capitalist culture, especially as global capitalist powers continue to support and facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, whilst repressing those who protest in opposition. Discussions like these are integral to a communist revolution, serving both as a site of revolutionary communist praxis, and, through the warmness of its Party members, their sociality, and their collective sharing of childcare, as a site for revolutionary, everyday, communist practice.
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Bringing solidarity to students against genocide

On April 17th,  a couple of comrades with whom I have been organizing within a mass organization and I went up to Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus to show solidarity with students who have been organizing around Palestine and were having a rally that afternoon. We wanted to bridge the gap between Rutgers Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden campuses, and discuss some of the organizing we’ve been doing not just in Newark, but in Teaneck, Morristown, and West Orange, making parallels between gentrification and imperialism while reiterating that the genocide in Gaza is an attack against workers worldwide.  It isn’t enough to just fight for a ceasefire or to call for divestment. We have to continue to organize and build so that we can wrest power from the bosses! 

While the rally was happening, I found out that there was another rally being held by union faculty workers who were protesting President Holloway’s cutting of the writing program at the college. I saw many signs that were similar to PLP’s chants (e.g. The Students United Will Never Be Defeated; Make the Bosses Take the Losses). A Pro-Israel heckler disrupted the rally, and it led the Pro-Palestinian students and union faculty to split from one another. 

I felt that it was a big mistake for many of the faculty to ignore the students and not show solidarity with them. After all, Holloway’s attack on the writing program is the result of increasing attacks on the humanities programs in colleges, which is one of the hallmarks signs of fascism. We need to defend the humanities at all costs—which is where thoughts, ideas, and consciousness are spread. Furthermore, it was sad to see that one lone person could easily cause so much chaos and discord. It was a learning lesson, for sure.
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