The latest response to the state terror in Gaza from Genocide Joe Biden and Top KKKop Kamala Harris is a classic case of appearance and essence (see box). Between Biden’s announcement of “aid” drops and Harris’ phony call for a ceasefire, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class wants it to appear that they care about the mass slaughter and starvation in Palestine. But the essence is that the liberal rulers are terrified of international fightback and of isolationist Donald Trump recapturing the White House.

Despite the desperate efforts of the capitalist media to mislead and confuse us, more and more workers are seeing the Democrats’ true colors. In a period of nine days, hundreds of thousands of workers—including 19 percent of the total vote in Minnesota and 13 percent in Michigan and North Carolina—slapped Biden by voting “uncommitted” or “no preference” in the presidential primaries. Once-loyal liberal voters are disgusted and appalled by the Democrats’ complicity in arming Israel and enabling the racist mass murder in Gaza. On the international stage, a declining U.S. has little influence over events in the Middle East, or even over Israel, increasing the risk of a wider war in the region. 

Global fightback against genocide and starvation

The Zionists’ brutal ethnic cleansing has captured the attention of the international working class. On March 2, more than one hundred cities around the world staged "Shut it Down for Palestine" protests (ENN, 3/2). Over the last five months, millions of workers have said no to genocide and imperialist war. Though the politics in this struggle are mostly nationalist and reformist, this multiracial movement, led mainly by youth and women, has inspired our class. The Progressive Labor Party can do more to root itself in the mass organizations driving this international fightback. Our political line—that the only solution to nationalist genocide is a communist revolution--has never been truer. But we still need to win masses of workers to see the need for a communist party as the only way out of this capitalist hell.

Famines don’t happen overnight. Prior to the Israel invasion last October, malnutrition was essentially nonexistent in Gaza. Today, according to humanitarian organizations, it has the highest proportion of people living in food deprivation in the world (Guardian, 3/6). At the highest risk are children, who make up half of Gaza’s population. Thanks to the Zionists’ blockades, as World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain noted, “People in Gaza risk dying of hunger just miles from trucks filled with food” (World Health Organization, 1/15). With more than half a million people in Gaza one step away from famine (U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), the 38,000 meals recently dropped by the U.S. are pathetically inadequate (AP News, 3/2). 

After months of inaction and obscene indifference, it's no coincidence that Harris's call for a limited ceasefire or Biden’s celebration of the airdrops occurred within days of the Democratic primary humiliations (Reuters, 3/7). Regardless of whether Biden or fellow criminal Trump win in November, electoral politics can never change the capitalist system. An end to exploitation, racism, sexism, and war will never be on the ballot. Only a mass revolutionary communist party has the potential to turn the guns around and transform imperialist war into communist revolution. 

Ceasefire call driven by bosses’ cynicism

In her hypocritical speech to a crowd commemorating the famous antiracist civil rights fightback in Selma, Alabama, Harris called for an “immediate ceasefire” five months into the U.S.-funded slaughter of workers in Palestine. The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging Black, Latin, and Muslim workers from their ranks. These are the same workers that the liberal finance capitalist bosses need to recruit into their inevitable wars with Iran, Russia, and China over Middle Eastern trade routes and control over the region’s oil. Harris’ speech was nothing more than a cynical attempt to win these workers back into the Democrats’ fold.

From the loss of Iran in 1979 to the U.S. military debacles in Iraq and Syria to weakened relations with petroleum kingpin Saudi Arabia, the U.S. has little clout left in the region. As its imperialist rivals keep making political and economic inroads, the U.S. ruling class is forced to stand by Israel, even if doing so risks a wider war the U.S. isn’t ready to wage. At the same time, the U.S. bosses have little leverage over hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though Harris made a show of meeting with Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival, the fact is that both Gantz and Netanyahu are on the Israeli War Cabinet. Both have signed off on the genocide of workers and children in Palestine. If the U.S. still wielded the global power it had fifty years ago, Biden wouldn’t have to resort to building a temporary port off the Mediterranean to bypass Israeli blockades of aid into Gaza (Associated Press, 3/7) And Netanyahu wouldn’t be pursuing an invasion of Rafah in violation of Biden’s toothless “red line” (Politico 3/10)

The only solution is communist revolution

While most workers aren’t falling for the Democrats’ charade, they are a long way from committing to the fight for a communist revolution. While the essence of the main wing's agenda is visible to many, the working class still struggles to see the potential of our class to run the world and serve workers’ needs. But while the revolutionary beacons in Russia and China have been lost in the dark night of the current period, Progressive Labor Party's flame is small but bright! For our class sisters and brothers to be moved to join us, we must expand our potential by working in mass organizations and raising antiwar struggles everywhere we are. There is no day like today to fight back against imperialist war and end these capitalist horrors for good. Join us!

Understanding Apperance and Essence

Dialectical materialism is the Marxist theory that historical events result from the conflict of opposing social forces—from a series of contradictions and their solutions. “Appearance and essence” is one category of dialectical materialism. The essence is the truth of something at its core, something that’s often hard to see it because it lies so deep within the thing. Appearance is what is readily visible about the thing. Because there is a tendency to avoid digging deep to discover a thing’s essence, misleading appearances tend to become conventional wisdoms. For example, the U.S. Democratic Party leaders might appear to be more compassionate and pro-worker than the Republicans because they pretend to care about racism, poverty, and reproductive health. In essence, however, they are controlled by the billionaires of finance capital. These misleaders will resort to lies and deceit to try to gain workers’ allegiance to their agenda for fascism and world war. 

TEANECK, NJ, March 10—Upwards of 500 angry workers and youth gathered outside of the Teaneck National Guard Armory on Sunday to protest the U.S. military’s active support and local New Jersey Zionists participation in the genocide in Palestine. An Israeli real estate company, My Home in Israel, is one of many companies around the world where Zionists are clamoring to purchase lands where workers in Palestine have been violently displaced (NYT- 3/11). As mass starvation and famine sets in due to the imperialist genocide of workers in Palestine, workers around the world are intensifying their rage which manifested at the protest of this property showcase.

The U.S. bosses revealed  again their  role in the genocide by calling out local Teaneck police to insure that the showcase took place, About half a dozen members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  attended and hundreds of CHALLENGEs were distributed, as well as a letter of anti-racist solidarity connecting workers from Gaza to workers facing eviction and gentrification in New Jersey.PLP demonstrated once again that in spite of the limited, nationalist leadership of the anti-occupation movement, our class supports the internationalist vision of workers’ power and that our ideas are indeed mass ideas.

Workers militantly confront zionism—open to communist politics 

While the Zionest counter protesters were to be expected, what was not expected was the militant reaction of protesters. A group of young and courageous protesters broke ranks during the rally in front of the Teaneck armory, setting a militant tone for the rest of the day. Meanwhile the bosses quickly showed that their lackey police were there only to serve and protect the Zionists and not the rights of our protest. When one lone Zionist showed up across the street from the rally at the armory, dozens of courageous youth crossed the street and encircled him with chants and flags.

As members of PLP, we met before the rally, developed our own strategy for security, and ensured that we were supportive but not spontaneously driven to a fight that our class was not prepared for. The anger and desperation that workers feel can only be resolved by waging internationalist class war against phony capitalist democracy and its inevitable path to inter-imperialist war and fascism.

Later on during the demonstration we drew on that anger and militancy against another group of Zionist counter protesters by leading dozens in a chant calling them the Nazi fascists that they are. Many were invigorated at the identification of Zionism with the historical fact of fascism during World War II. Our goal was to offer a counter-narrative to the lie that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, and workers appreciated that. 
While the protest leaders energetically led the crowd for hours, they failed politically to make the  connections between the Teaneck armory and the property sales of stolen land.  In other words, none of the leaders gave a speech about how U.S. imperialist strategy for the past 75 years has entailed naked support for Zionist Israel as an anchor site for their profiteering domination in the oil-rich Middle East. Even more,  U.S. bosses' imperialist dogfights in the Middle East–anywhere from Yemen to Iran–were not addressed at all. Thousands of New Jersey National Guard soldiers were deployed to unknown parts of the Middle East in the past few weeks (News 12 NJ, 1/16).

The so-called “aid” efforts of the U.S., such as a proposal for a temporary port on the Gaza coast, will more than likely become launching pads for future U.S. operations. The leaders of the protest avoided these larger geopolitical concerns and simply declared that one ethno-nationalist Palestinian state was the solution.

We were there to fill in the gaps and offer a counter-analysis and solution through our bullhorns, papers and one-on-one conversations. We led dozens in a chant screaming “Arab, Jewish, Black and white, same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite!” And as we left, many of the protesters thanked us for our contribution to the internationalist militancy of the event. 

Communism  internationalism smashing racist borders

The highlight was perhaps when we got dozens of protesters at the rally to take letters of support for a Morristown-based PLP comrade who stands to face eviction after denouncing  the brutal, racist housing authority in their remodeling scheme of her complex. Utilizing PLP’s slogan that “U.S. Israel Hand in Hand, Racist Displacement is the Bosses Plan,” we spread this message at the rally while actively encouraging protesters to send their letters to the Morristown courts in defense of our comrade. While we could have more courageously disrupted the rally in front of the armory, we maintained our politics and made efforts to bring our line to the fore any chance we got. Many were left with these words to ponder on, written by a Morristown PL’er and communist politics.

Poem to inspire workers power
  “It Happens Here and There”

Waiting on a response from the powers that Be
To be the powers that see or not to see
What capitalism is doing to our communities
Still waiting and contemplating on the next
Chess move that maybe the best move
To take down the upside down frown of the
The people who take the beating with a smile
Still being whipped in such a clever way
Because today the scars are not visible
They use the Willy Lynch tool to break
Down the mental in hopes that we never
See or understand that the power is in
Our hands if we take a stand and fight together!

Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.

In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
This series aims to reunite the history of communism with antiracism. Part I explored how the fight to free Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to find out more.

Part II explored how the international communist movement was the impetus of the civil rights movement. It excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College.
The communist movement both helped inspire and was shaped by the antiracist struggle for civil rights in the U.S. Martin Luther King Jr. and many of the leading civil rights figures were influenced by the Communist Party (CP). Rosa Parks had attended Communist Party meetings and been trained as an activist at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee which had been supported by members and friends of the CP. Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levinson and Jack O’Dell, who all played important roles in King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that grew out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, were active at various times in the communist movement.

Communist leadership in the Jim Crow south

Just as important was the 25-year history of the Communist Party in Alabama led by Black workers leading many struggles against racism and building several organizations including the International Labor Defense, the Sharecroppers Union, the International Workers Order, the League of Young Southerners, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress that in total involved around 20,000 mainly Black workers. These organizations were at their peak in the 1930’s, but the experience of fighting against racism and for the needs of the working-class laid the basis for the fight against Jim Crow laws in the 1950’s and 60’s.

The Party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the…concerns of black people.

Communists believed that organizing the working-class would work only if white workers realized that their liberation, too, was bound up with the fate of Black workers….

In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and dispossessed elements of American society.” “It was the Black workers drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political choices as much as … the Communist International (NY Times 6/6).

Like the Scottsboro campaign 20 years earlier the Montgomery Bus Boycott, initiated when Rosa Parks refused to move to the Black section of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, drew world-wide attention to the fight against racism in the segregated South. The fight for civil rights became a major embarrassment to the U.S. ruling-class. At the time, China, the world’s largest country was communist-led, as was the Soviet Union. These two worker super powers provided leadership and support to anti-imperialist movements across Africa, Asia, and South America.

U.S. rulers forced to support Civil Rights Movement

The U.S tried to counter the growing communist-led movements by championing capitalist democracy, but at every turn the racist conditions forced on Black workers in the United States and the increasing demonstrations against those conditions undercut the U.S. bosses’ attempts to gain support.

Under increasing pressure, the U.S. bosses were forced into tacitly supporting the growing civil rights movement. At the same time, they were terrified of the movement that brought together hundreds of thousands of Black and white workers and students in the fight against segregation. The U.S. ruling-class, between a rock and a hard place, tried to gain control of the movement by both working with and threatening Martin Luther King.

John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson worked with Martin Luther King to end official Jim Crow. The bosses’ legal arm led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, spied on and tried to disrupt and control the movement by building anti-communism. The bosses’ goal was to limit the movement to blaming the smaller Southern bosses for all of the racism in the country and ignore the racist conditions in the North.

Liberal misleaders try attacked antiracists and communists

The ruling-class went after every leader and institution connected to the civil rights movement to try to keep it under control. Martin Luther King as the leading figure of the movement came under particular attack and pressure.
In 1963 King bowed to the wishes of the Kennedy Administration and fired SCLC employee Jack O’Dell after the FBI alleged that he was a communist. King also agreed to cease direct communication with his friend and closest white advisor, Stanley Levison, although he eventually resumed contact with him in March 1965. FBI surveillance and bugs tracked King’s political associations and produced evidence of King’s extramarital sexual activities—information that was later leaked to some reporters.

In 1965 King faced questions from journalists on Meet the Press about his association with Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, which had been branded a ‘‘Communist training school’’ on billboards that appeared throughout Alabama during the Selma to Montgomery March and showed King attending a Highlander workshop. (Stanford University King Encyclopedia)

Communist leadership was instrumental in Civil Rights movement

King was a contradictory figure. He publicly professed anti-communism, yet he was undoubtedly influenced by the communist movement and recognized that communism reflected the desires of an exploited working-class oppressed by racism.
Indeed, it may be that communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all too inert. Communism should challenge us to be more concerned about social justice. However much is wrong with communism, we must admit that it arose as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1847 by Marx and Engels, emphasizes throughout how the middle-class has exploited the lower-class. Communism in society is a classless society. Along with this goes a strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice. Communism seeks to transcend the superficialities of race and color, and you are able to join the Communist Party whatever the color of your skin or the quality of your blood.” (MLK speech “Can a Christian be a Communist”)

At the end of the famed march from Selma to Montgomery, King gave perhaps his clearest speech on the roots of racism as a tool used by the bosses to divide the working-class:

Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then…the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem…to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Later King began to expand his public activity to address the war in Vietnam and attempted to extoll the U.S. to end the war on communism.
[I]n the summer of 1965 the press reported King’s off-the-cuff remarks to a Southern Christian Leadership Conference rally in Virginia: ‘‘We’re not going to defeat Communism with bombs and guns and gases.… We must work this out in the framework of our democracy’’ (‘‘Dr. King Declares’’). 

In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King decried 
America’s ‘‘morbid fear of communism,’’ arguing that it prevented people from embracing a ‘‘revolutionary spirit and … declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.’’ (Stanford University King Encyclopedia)

Ruling class violence met with antiracist workers’ rebellion

While there are so many unanswered questions about the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, like the killing of Malcolm X, it coincided with an expansion in King’s political focus from civil rights for Black workers in the United States to fighting for 
economic rights for the working class and opposing imperialism. King was killed in Memphis where he was actively supporting striking Black sanitation workers.

As the ruling-class pressured King and ultimately murdered him, the working-class became increasingly politicized. Rebellions of Black workers rocked Newark, Watts, Harlem and Detroit and U.S Soldiers were rebelling against the war in Vietnam. In spite of the bosses’ attempts to smother the movement, the working-class was rising up. The bosses may have hoped that killing King would stop the movement but instead the attack hardened the resolve of the working-class, particularly Black workers, to continue to fight.

WASHINGTON, DC, March 6—Today a bold elementary school teacher fought to present a ceasefire resolution to stop genocide in Gaza at his union meeting (the Montgomery County Education Association). Over 200 teachers – many more than usual – attended this meeting in response to the controversy over the runup to this resolution. This struggle demonstrated that fighting Israeli fascism and its US ruling class backers must be on everyone’s agenda. The communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) brought revolutionary analysis to this activity, arguing that only armed struggle for communist revolution will ultimately defeat fascism.

Antiracists versus zionists

The teacher had submitted a request to present the NBI (new business item) containing the resolution for ceasefire back in January. After months of setbacks and redirections from union leaders, the resolution was finally cleared for presentation and ensuing debate at the March representative assembly meeting for the MCEA. The teacher worked with the union vice president who would chair the meeting to determine the best way to present the resolution. But the Jewish Community Relations Council of Washington DC (JCRC), a local pro-genocide zionist organization, got wind of this upcoming resolution from pro-Israel teachers, some of whom threatened to quit the union if the resolution was even brought up for debate! 

The JCRC had already succeeded in pressing the Montgomery County school administration to place several teachers on administrative leave based on  spurious antisemitism charges (CHALLENGE, 1/17 & 2/28). 

The zionists set their sights on intimidating the union leaders into ruling that  consideration of the resolution “out of order”. They issued a leaflet filled with distortions and lies and called for a pro-Israel rally outside the union meeting. The vice president  gave in to the pressure and declared the resolution “out of order” and moved on to another agenda item. One angry teacher leaped from her seat objecting to that decision and was threatened with being removed from the meeting! Other teachers walked out of the meeting in disgust at their leaders. The lame excuse the vice president and the union lawyer gave for caving to zionist pressure was a bylaw in the Union’s rulebook that says the MCEA is a local entity and doesn’t have authority to speak on anything outside of the “local nexus”.

Antiracists keep fighting!

But the anti-genocide teacher was not done! During the “open mic” portion of the agenda, he declared that the bylaw and the vice president’s decision was what was “out of order” and gave a strong principled speech about the need for the union to come down on the side of oppressed workers everywhere, especially where ongoing genocide was occurring. “We are 
antiracist teachers and if we are trying to fight racism we must fight it everywhere we see it—not just our town, county, state or country—we must be international and unite—Jewish, Arab, Black, White and Latin must unite and be one to fight racism!” He read the entire “out of order” ceasefire resolution to many appreciative teachers. Other teachers then stepped to the mic in solidarity. Since the meeting, other teachers have sent emails of support to the resolution’s author, so the future is bright.

Meanwhile, outside the meeting, PLP members and other anti-genocide organizers rallied in support of the teacher, chanting “Stop Killing Babies” and “Workers of the World Unite” while the JCRC members, defended by 11 armed police, pitifully chanted “School Solutions, Not War Resolutions”. PLP members distributed Challenges and PLP flyers and made contacts with new activists, ensuring that more revolutionary consciousness will be raised in the days to come. But an ominous fact was that the Zionists slightly outnumbered the anti-genocide organizers. We must increase our base building and mobilization among our friends and co-workers to ensure that we control the streets when fascists threaten.