Salute to working-class fathers in Gaza and beyond

This Father’s Day I celebrated part of the day with my family at a protest honoring Palestinian fathers killed or struggling to survive. As the intensified genocide in Gaza has continued into its nine month, countless family members have lost fathers and father figures. Several speakers at the event in NYC raised money for Palestinian workers who have been devastated by the U.S.-financed atrocities. While the bosses media will occasionally describe the tragedy of working class children and women killed in Palestine, there is a tendency on the part of the racist news outlets to belittle the lives of working-class Palestinian men killed by Israeli bombs.

I had the chance to speak as a member of Progressive Labor Party and a mass organization from my neighborhood that has been holding weekly vigils for those killed in Palestine. I shared a song about being a dad under capitalism, the alienation I’ve felt taking time off from my regular job, and how we are all hurt by the sexist, racist, Zionist system. “Let’s raise this generation to not use quick fixes, band-aids or sutures /But cure the whole world with communism as their future” I concluded. I then distributed over 20 CHALLENGE newspapers to the small but spirited crowd and exchanged contact info with several folks I met.
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Beat back kkkourts’ attack on Mohawk

Last issue contained a letter describing the spirited defense in court of working class fighter Mohawk. The bosses tried to use their courts and jails to ruin his life for defending fellow workers under attack by the bosses’ violent lapdogs, the cops. If you have been involved with the Party for any amount of time, or even if you haven’t, you know the bosses and the police use the courts as a formality to fining, imprisoning, and even murdering working class resistance. We workers are often fed propaganda about the so-called neutrality and objectivity of our legal system, that “justice is blind.” Well the bosses seem to have their eyes wide open to the reality of class warfare and so when the working class came to the trial in numbers to support Mohawk,the bosses and judges knew they better back off! That is the only reason six of Mohawk’s eight felonies were dropped. The rest of us need to take the same lesson away: we are in a war between workers and bosses (and their errand boys the police). The courts did not protect Mohawk, it was the working class who made the judges and police retreat from their attack. Don’t let the misleaders trick us into trusting the bosses’ courts. Keep on building our red army of workers and keep up the fight!
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DC protesters open to communist ideas

I wanted to share some thoughts on my conversations at the “Red Line” pro-Palestine rally at the White House in Washington, D.C. recently. There are many opportunities for Party building at these big demonstrations. One conversation was with a recent graduate who had earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and his friends had been able to land jobs that did not involve defense contractors, either for bomb making or designing planes with bomb storage. I asked him to write a letter about these growing war preparations to CHALLENGE. 
He graduated from Clark University in Worcester and knew about the long strike at St. Vincent’s, but was intrigued to learn of Progressive Labor Party’s involvement in that struggle. Another protester I met attends the University of Maine. She also was interested in our Party. She is interning in Richmond, VA along with another student from Richmond. 

I gave both of them our nearby comrade’s number and I sent him their numbers for follow up along with CHALLENGE. Three young men from Cincinnati came on a bus sponsored by PSL. We discussed the pitfalls of socialism and the need to abolish the wage system by a direct fight for communism, so they have a lot to think about now. Interestingly, one of their friends works at a Honda factory. Hopefully we’ll stay in touch.

The most hilarious encounter I had was with a woman who asked,  “Do you follow Bob Avakian?” I explained he was a cult leader and PLP fights against revisionism and cults of personality. She was visibly relaxed and took the paper. Overall, our PLP team got over 10 solid contacts. Comrades are already meeting with two of them with more to come. The future is bright!
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No more Riot Fest—what we do counts!

On June 11th the residents in my neighborhood and I received some uplifting news: the despised and destructive for-profit rock festival, Riot Fest, would NOT be returning to the west side of Chicago for September of this year. Since 2015, the concert has been held in Douglass Park, blocking off access to green and recreational spaces for mostly Black and Latin workers and youth for weeks at a time (see CHALLENGE, 7/5/23).

This outcome represents a significant victory for working-class residents of the area. Up against a well-equipped foe with media savvy, loads of money, and connections to local bosses, a multiracial group of residents organized tirelessly to expose the exploitative and racist nature of Riot Fest and mobilize a base of support. Countless letters were written, petitions were circulated, park district meetings attended, and damage to the park in the aftermath was documented. Every seemingly small action contributed to the goal – what we do counts!

I personally have been inspired and honored to take part in the anti-Riot Fest organizing in a very modest capacity. As a communist, I understand that every reform victory that the bosses give up to us workers is almost always temporary. I know that because we still live under capitalism that other capitalist businesses are going to keep working non-stop to make profit in racist and sexist ways. 

The victory that the bosses can’t readily take away is the multiracial unity, collectivity, and elevated class consciousness that has grown through the organizing work. That we can work and struggle together for common goals without material incentives. These are the communist ideals that I have worked to try to insert into our group discussions.

What hasn’t hurt either to raise consciousness of the nature of the capitalist system is the gross opportunism of the city’s bosses, including the “people’s mayor” Brandon Johnson. upon hearing the news he asked if there was a way to “salvage” the relationship with Riot Fest! When we see the system for what it is and have confidence in our ability to run society better, we are making steps towards an egalitarian world. The struggle continues!
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Famine in Sudan

Foreign Affairs, 6/17–The biggest hunger crisis in the world is unfolding in Sudan, and it is manmade. As of now, more than half of the country’s 45 million people urgently need humanitarian assistance. In May, the United Nations warned that 18 million Sudanese are “acutely hungry” including 3.6 million children who are “acutely malnourished.” The western region of Darfur, where the threat is greatest, is nearly cut off from humanitarian aid. According to one projection, as much as five percent of Sudan’s population could die of starvation by the end of the year…This dire situation is not the result of a bad harvest or climate-induced food scarcity. It is the direct consequence of actions by both sides of Sudan’s terrible civil war…Neither side is likely to relent on its own..the keys to opening the country to aid likely lie in the hands of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two biggest regional powers vying for influence in the Horn of Africa.

Israeli military guilty of torture

DerSpiegel, 6/7–His father, his five older brothers and he were detained by the Israeli military in late February. The soldiers, he says, discovered a tunnel near their home in Zaitoun, a district of Gaza City, and immediately arrested them. At first, they were locked up in a neighboring home. After a few hours, they were made to undress and sit in a hole in the ground. It was cold, he says, and the soldiers poured water on them and urinated on them. Then, says Obaid, they tied him up, blindfolded him, cut open his underwear with a sharp object and shoved a wooden stick into his anus. He says he begged them to stop. After that, he says, he was brought to a military camp and detained for 18 days. The soldiers there interrogated him over and over again, asking him about his family members, his neighborhood and Hamas. And they repeatedly hit him in the head and upper body, he says, adding that he still has nightmares…

Nigerian workers suffer economic disaster

NY Times, 6/11–Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with skyrocketing inflation, a national currency in free-fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Only two years ago Africa’s biggest economy…The pain was widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies...

On a recent morning in a corner of the biggest emergency room in northern Nigeria, three women were convulsing in painful spasms, unable to speak. Each year, the E.R. at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano…received one or two cases of hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition, said Salisu Garba, a kindly health worker who hurried from bed to bed, ward to ward. Now, with many unable to afford food, the hospital sees multiple cases every day. Mr. Garba was sizing up the women’s husbands. Which source of nutrition he recommended depended on what he thought they could afford. Baobab leaves or tiger nuts for the poor; boiled-up bones for the slightly better off. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could afford milk. 

Gas and poverty in Mozambique

Al Jazeera, 6/16–Economists use the shorthand of “the resource curse” to describe how communities who live atop hidden riches not only fail to profit but also face peril. In 2009, prospectors from the Texas company Anadarko found some of the world’s largest stores of natural gas off the coast of Cabo Delgado in Mozambique. The discovery of gas was at first a cause for celebration…

In 2019, TotalEnergies and its partners unveiled plans to invest $20bn in developing and extracting the gas in the largest foreign venture on the African continent…The people who once made their homes and tended crops there were moved to Quitunda, where construction began in 2018. In place of leveled villages sit a port and an airport along with a power station, street grid, emergency room and hundreds of cabins built to enclose TotalEnergies managers and gas workers within fortress-like walls…

Within a span of two weeks, Israel used made-in-USA bombs to strike the Tal as-Sultan refugee camp near Rafah, bombing and burning to death at least 45 displaced workers in yet another genocidal atrocity in Gaza; 134 people died in a single hospital in the Darfur region of Sudan. They were casualties of a yearlong, imperialist-fueled civil war and another looming genocide. From the Israeli Defense Forces’ state terror to the brutal battle between rival generals in Sudan, the future of our class without communism is bleak. 

With U.S. imperialism in steep decline, Hamas nationalists and dueling gangsters in Sudan are seeking to partner with capitalist rulers in Iran, China, and Russia. The resurgence of the civil war in Sudan and the ongoing bloodbath in Gaza are drawing the U.S. into more direct confrontation with their imperialist competition, all on the backs of Black and Brown workers. These conflicts reflect the world situation in this period, a time of dangerous instability, rising fascism, and inevitable world war. The world’s working class has only two options: to lie down and die for this deadly system, or to organize and fight for an internationalist, worker-led red army–for communist revolution.

Middle East: U.S bosses losing control 

According to a 2019 United Nations report, the Levant Basin in the eastern Mediterranean Sea contains 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, with an estimated total value of $524 billion (UN Conference on Trade and Development, 2019). Much of these resources lie beneath or off the coast of the Gaza Strip. Long before Israel’s most recent siege of racist slaughter and ethnic cleansing, the Zionist regime’s occupation and blockade of Gaza “prevented the Palestinian people from exercising any control over their own fossil fuel resources, denying them much-needed fiscal and export revenues and leaving the Palestinian economy on the verge of collapse” (Al Jazeera, 6/21/21).  

Given the economic stakes and the reality on the ground, where Gaza is physically devastated and Jewish settlers in the West Bank are killing and pillaging Muslim and Brown workers with impunity, a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine seems impossible. Israel’s capitalist rulers will attempt to hold on to these territories by any means necessary–including mass extermination and forced migration, the final solutions to Israel’s Palestine “problem.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. and regional power Saudi Arabia are nearing an agreement to develop Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program, a point of leverage against imperialist rivals of the U.S.: “Supporters of the arrangement maintain that it will enhance regional security by bolstering the U.S.-led alliance in the Middle East against Iran, checking the rising influence of China in the Arab world, and facilitating the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia” (Foreign Policy, 5/29). The nationalist misleaders who run Hamas, along with Hezbollah and the Houthis, are all funded by Iran. Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel stalled the pending nuclear deal. But even if it’s revived, the U.S. will be relying on de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, a loose cannon who  jails prime ministers and murders journalists. Between Salman and the reckless and defiant war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, the U.S. bosses are straining to keep their junior partners in check. 
For the world’s working class, the only solution is to smash the capitalist ruling class with a militant, internationalist revolution led by workers, students, and soldiers. Students and workers who expose capitalist universities for their complicity in genocide are leading the way. And as workers in Rafah and Sudan ration food to share and help each other survive, they show how we must practice communist principles even under the most dire conditions. Workers of the world unite to turn the bosses' imperialist wars into class wars to smash the bosses.

Sudan–flash point for wider war

U.S. weakness is emboldening Iran to strike back. As Saudi, Israeli, and U.S. bosses align, so are Sudanese and Iranian bosses. Although Sudan’s army officially cut joint military ties in 2016, workers there recently spotted Iranian drones. With Sudan strategically positioned on the Red Sea, it fits into Iran’s plan for geopolitical control over the Middle East. “From the other side of the Red Sea, Yemen's Houthis, armed in part by Iran, have launched attacks in support of Hamas in Gaza” (Reuters, 4/10). 

Iran isn’t the only power planting a stake in Africa. Just as imperialist competition for land, markets, and labor in Africa was central to the world wars of the 1900s, Sudan’s current civil war reflects today’s inter-imperialist rivalry. Chinese bosses are funneling billions in loans for infrastructure development that will draw the continent more tightly into their global capitalist network. Currently pending is an agreement between Ugandan officials and the Chinese firm Sinohydro to develop a $180 million power transmission line from Uganda to energy-starved South Sudan (Reuters, 4/14). Although Russia, a major oil exporter, has no need for Sudanese oil, they are a longstanding security partner and are keen to set up a naval base in Port Sudan on the Red Sea (AP News, 2/11/2023). While Russia and China claim to be joined at the hip in opposition to the U.S. and NATO in Ukraine, their interests–and those of the Iranian capitalists–may clash in Sudan. China’s calls for “peacekeeping: and “stability” are muffled by the drumbeats of war. 

Build the communist “red line of history”

Workers around the world–from Paris to Israel, from New York to Lebanon–have risen up in protest against the mass murder in Rafah, demanding an end to Israel’s slaughter and occupation. Smaller protests have surfaced in cities like Philadelphia, linking the Sudan genocide to the struggles of workers in Gaza. But calls for “divestment” by universities or support for the “resistance” and ceasefires reveal the basic limits of reforms under capitalism. Genocide Joe Biden’s lying proclamations aside, there is no “red line” for the bosses’ profit-driven greed. With revolutionary communist leadership, workers must demand the overthrow of the capitalist system, drawing a “red line of history” that our class can celebrate and develop for generations to come. 

With internationalist communism as our guide, we must be inspired by the courage of the workers in Gaza to seize every opportunity to build international workers' power, freed from the nationalism that divides us. From Israel and Palestine to Sudan and beyond, we can smash the imperialists and the nationalists and their murderous plans! إلى أعلى، إلى أعلى، مع العمال Up! Up! Up with the workers! Join the Progressive Labor Party!

Detroit MI, May 24—The People’s Conference for Palestine presented a tremendous opportunity for members and friends of Progressive Labor Party to engage in sharp political action and discussion centered around U.S. imperialism, the bosses’ use of nationalism to divide and weaken the working class, the misleadership of the conference organizers, the tremendous potential for a new society embodied by solidarity encampments, and the need for communist revolution to sweep away the old society. 

People’s Conference: ruling class ideas on display

The message of the conference was clear: “Freedom” for Palestinians means a Palestinian ruling class replacing Zionist occupiers. There was constant glorification of South Africa, Algeria and other post-colonial countries, with zero recognition that inequality and racism still stalk the working class of these countries. In discussions our group was clear that simply replacing one set of bosses for another isn’t the answer. As a comrade put it, “capitalism and liberation are incompatible.” 

The bankrupt politics and hypocrisy at work in the conference were made crystal clear when we were attacked for distributing CHALLENGE and our conference leaflet. The organizers went so far as to threaten to call the cops if we continued distributing. This development made it clear that organizers demanded adherence to the conference’s politics of pro-Hamas nationalism. The emptiness of their slogans of working-class solidarity were put on full display.

Finally, the last day of the conference coincided with the barbaric incineration of 45 Gazan refugees by the fascist Israeli army. The rhetoric was full of outrage, but there was no action. Our small group attempted to get attendees to visit the nearby encampment at Wayne State University, not more than 10 minutes away by car, for a rally, but the conference organizers did nothing. 

Gotta be in it to win it

The trip was only possible because we’ve immersed ourselves in the class struggle on our campuses. On our local campuses, we’ve formed and given political leadership to our Common Ground anti-racist clubs which has exposed dozens and dozens of students to our political ideas. These clubs have been the vehicle for sharpening the class struggle on campus, where we’ve taken on racist administrators and exposed their anti-student policies. 

We also met students by throwing ourselves (if unevenly) into the encampments in New York. Unlike the fake left leadership of the conference, these encampments gave us a real glimpse at the power of the multi-racial working class. Without a politician or boss in sight, students organized their mini-societies: food, housing, education, security, healthcare, sanitation - it was all organized collectively.  We were there, contributing to these efforts, all the while struggling against identity politics and nationalism and for a disciplined and internationalist outlook. The encampments, mostly led by women workers and students, allowed us to meet some of the fiercest fighters against U.S. imperialism, Zionism and capitalism.

They were willing to risk arrest, suspension and expulsion to fight for Gaza and the international working class.
Importantly, the encampments also forced the liberal bosses to strip away their masks and show their fascist essence as they welcomed the kkkops to attack and brutalize students and workers. 

The efforts we made to be a part of the class struggle are entirely responsible for us being able to bring a group to the conference in Detroit. The lesson could not be clearer: only by committing ourselves to participating in the class struggle and to being involved wherever workers or students are in motion is the ONLY way we can build a party that is capable of launching a revolution for communism.