Here in Israel, I attended a rally for McDonald’s workers’ rights. Most of the protesters were Jewish students. For the past couple years, they have been fighting for increased wages and rights. However, when workers attend protests, they have gotten fired, suspended, or otherwise harassed. This protest was in solidarity with those workers to show the bosses that our class will not be intimidated and the movement will not be crushed.
Red Leadership Needed
Before the trade union leaders of Histadrut let me speak on the microphone, they wanted to know what I had to say. I told them, “I wanted to say that in the U.S. there is a similar movement for fast food workers (FF15) and that exploitation in Israel is the same as exploitation worldwide. All working class people have the same struggles and interests and we must unite against our oppressors, the capitalists.”
Upon hearing that, the leader said he represents the union and I cannot talk about exploitation because they are involved in a legal battle. If they claim workers are being exploited, it could be used against them in court. How outrageous! The union leadership is just as fake in Israel as in the U.S.! In fact, they make wimpy U.S. unions look strong. Workers in Israel make about $6.50 an hour. To not call that what it is — exploitation — is ridiculous. True victories have never been won in court but through workers organizing and fighting back.
Histadrut is a Zionist union that supports attacks on Gaza. It collaborated with the ruling class of South Africa under apartheid, and received funding from the CIA as well as the AFL-CIO, the trade union federation in the United States. Workers in Histadrut led a general strike in 2012 for low-wage and subcontracted workers that led to a settlement, including a three-year ban on any further strikes. The role of unions under capitalism is to negotiate the terms of workers’ exploitation, and play workers into the hands of ruling-class parties. This is true worldwide.
Confidence in the Working Class
What gave me hope, however, is talking to everyday people at the rally. I found a lot of people who agreed that workers in Israel and Palestine face the same struggles because of capitalism. Contrary to what I’ve heard, not everyone has been won to Israeli fascism. There are still workers who want to unite with their class in Palestine to create a better world. There are antiracist Jewish workers here, like everywhere else, who are open to communism. We should always have confidence in the working class to understand and fight for communist revolution. Join the fight!
NEW YORK, November 12 — This Veteran’s Day, twenty members and friends of Progressive Labor Party rallied against racist tuition hikes at Medgar Evers College (MEC), a Brooklyn branch of the City University of New York (CUNY). As we confronted campus cops and attacked racist police terror, we explained how imperialism is leading to world war. Most important, we raised the banner of communist revolution.
The next day, at Hunter College in Manhattan, PL’ers attended the much bigger Million Student March. Although if failed to point the way to revolution, three women PL’ers stepped up and provided a communist spark.
Defy the Bosses
At the MEC rally, CHALLENGE practically flew out of our hands; we distributed more than 350 papers before running out. Many student friends came to join us, with two providing strategic leadership. PLP declared that the best way to honor veterans is to fight U.S. imperialism and rally in solidarity with our working-class sisters and brothers in the Middle East.
After an hour-long outdoor demonstration, students made the bold decision to rally inside the MEC cafeteria, though we knew the campus kkkops would give us a hard time. Some students recognized us from our CHALLENGE sales and asked how they might get involved and come to our study groups. Others clapped and chanted with us. When the administration yelled at us to leave, we chanted, “When they say exit, we say fight back!”
With every rally at MEC, we meet more antiracist students. The struggle for a better world will continue as we fight to smash this racist system and replace it with communism!
Three Women Leaders, One Fierce Line
The Million Student March was called to demand tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt and a $15 minimum wage for campus workers. With nothing more than a bullhorn, a few signs, and determination, three women comrades again raised the banner of communism.
As we approached the rally, we heard an unamplified chanting with no class content: “CUNY for the people!” But the schools we have today will never be for working people. “Higher education” is an instrument of the ruling class to poison the next generation with racist, sexist ideas, and to justify capitalist inequalities. Colleges and universities foster research that attacks the working class, from military studies to racist pseudo-science on human intelligence. Under communism, after a mass working class seizes state power with a communist revolution, all workers will participate in lifelong education that serves the needs of our class.
At Hunter College, more than 150 protesters marched to Chancellor James B. Milliken’s house to demand an end to tuition hikes. Despite our strength in numbers, the march organizers called for everyone to follow the cops’ orders. These misleaders led chants like “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” while herding people onto the sidewalk! To be serious about revolution, you have to start training now. You take the streets, you use a bullhorn, and within the limits of the period and situation you defy the cops. You must have confidence in the working class, and you need a revolutionary communist party to lead.
On the march back to Hunter, we chanted, “Tuition hikes mean we got to fight back!” and “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” We linked tuition hikes to racist murders by cops; both are attacks on working-class youth. Soon all 150 people were chanting with us.
As we shared the bullhorn with others, the speeches became more militant, more anti-racist and anti-sexist, more class-based, and more international. It was inspiring to see what three women could do with a bullhorn and a sharp line. With just a little boldness, we were able to shift the politics sharply to the left.
Our struggle will be long and hard, but it makes for a life worth living. As we chanted as the rally, “The only solution is communist revolution!”
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CUNY, like all schools, serves the needs of the bosses. Capitalist education funnels us into the bosses’ system of competition and individualism. It tries to brainwash us into believing in the bosses’ sham of democracy and the myth of equal opportunity.
Since 2011, CUNY tuition has increased $300 per year, and more hikes for the city’four-year colleges are planned. Where is this money going? Not to improve education for these mainly Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant students! In fact, our professors, staff, and campus workers haven’t seen a raise in six years. Many live in poverty. Rather, these tuition hikes are funding the bosses’ oil war plans.
In 2013, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) was restored at CUNY. The capitalist rulers are intensifying recruitment of Black, Latin, and immigrant youth as U.S. imperialism moves toward broader global wars. The students now under-served at CUNY (and at public colleges throughout the U.S.) are the ones who will be drafted and sent to fight these wars.
When soldiers rebelled against the Vietnam War, Black soldiers led the way. Recently, in Ferguson and Baltimore, Black workers again led the fightback against racist murders by police. Students and workers have no stake in the bosses’ bloody conflicts. Only communism, a system run by and for workers, can create a world without tuition, poverty, and war.
CHICAGO, November 22 — On any given Saturday night in the trauma unit at Mount Sinai Hospital on Chicago’s West Side, many Black and Latin men are admitted with multiple gunshot wounds. For this comrade and his co-workers, it happens so regularly that it seems almost routine. But there’s nothing acceptable about the street violence—an outgrowth of the daily economic violence of capitalism—that brutalizes members of our class. Equally unacceptable are the proposed “solutions” by the city’s ruling class, from more killer cops on the street to stricter gun legislation to longer prison sentences.
Murderous Care Black Workers
About 30 years ago, when a trauma care network was first established in Chicago, a number of Level 1 trauma centers were created on the city’s North and West sides and nearby suburbs. But only two served the South Side, where the majority of the population is Black: the Michael Reese Hospital and the University of Chicago Medical Center. In 1988, two years after opening it, the obscenely wealthy, Rockefeller-created University of Chicago closed its adult trauma center, citing large financial losses. Today it accepts only patients 15 and younger. Michael Reese Hospital’s trauma center closed in 1991.
The city’s failure to maintain a Level 1 trauma center on the South Side is racist to the core. Most Black victims of major trauma must be transported up to ten miles to a hospital with adequate facilities. According to the American Journal of Public Health, people shot more than five miles from the nearest trauma center are 23 percent more likely to die in transit. Of the two thousand-plus gunshot wound victims in Chicago in 2015 to date, more than 800 fall outside that five-mile radius (Chicago Tribune, 9/11/15).
Racist Liberals Attack; Workers Fight Back
For those who view Democrats as the “lesser evil,” the liberal leaders’ approach to health care in Chicago is instructive. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley did little or nothing during his 22 years in office to re-open a trauma center on the South Side. Current Mayor Rahm Emanuel led the charge to close half the city’s mental health clinics in 2012. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle appears ready to approve the closing of pediatric inpatient services at Stroger Hospital, which serves mostly Black and immigrant workers and their families (see CHALLENGE, 11/11/15).
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is building a $500 million presidential library near the University of Chicago.
Finally after years of pressure from working-class activists, the University of Chicago is partnering with Sinai Health Systems to create a trauma center within Holy Cross Hospital in the city’s Southwest side. But workers must put this “victory” into context. It will do nothing to fight the poverty, desperation and violence created by the capitalist profit system.
Instead of worker-on-worker violence, the international working class needs worker-on-capitalist violence with a mass working-class Red army. We need an army to fight back against the racist Chicago Police Department for the murder of Laquan McDonald. We need to turn the guns around in the escalating imperialist bloodbath in Syria—and aim them at the capitalist bosses on all sides.
Only a communist society will make workers’ health a priority. Only communism can eradicate all the traumas of capitalism—for good.
CHICAGO, November 10 — Communists from the Progressive Labor Party joined the 12,000 attendees at the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual convention in early November, and raised revolutionary politics through a rally, literature distribution, discussion groups, and more.
We kicked off with mass leafleting and selling CHALLENGE at the Opening Session. Our message: Capitalism is the enemy of public health – fighting racism is the key to social change and public health. Our leaflet also documented many struggles we are engaged in. Other organizing tools included a flyer about price gouging by drug companies.
PLP organized fighters for our annual Troublemakers Breakfast to discuss public health politics and plan actions for APHA. Over 30 people participated, including students. Our discussion covered a wide range, including about the cutbacks in healthcare that involve the threatened closure of the pediatrics program at Stroger Hospital. Others raised the issues of the excessive prices of HIV and Hepatitis C drugs, and the fight against cholera in Haiti. We also examined student debt, the apartheid state of Israel-Palestine, and the high murder rates of transgender (particularly Black transgender) people. The group vowed to coordinate local and national public health struggles in the coming year.
U.S. Police Terror and Israeli Apartheid
In the session organized by the Black Caucus of Health Workers, young black students and professionals from the University of Illinois at presented talks on police violence. Treating racist police murder as part of a long-term public health crisis, speakers revealed that the number of people killed by kkkops— about 1,150 a year — is about seven times as high as the number of people lynched (160 a year) in the peak years of 1880s and 1890s.Without the recent courage and militancy of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebels, there would be a much smaller movement against racist state violence, and less of an impetus for an important session like this one.
In the session on Palestinian health justice, a PLP member presented a paper proposing a single secular communist state in Israel-Palestine and exposing the unequal class societies that prevail in both Israel and Palestine. The audience applauded. This begs the question: why can’t all borders be eliminated? It is not possible to have communism without making a worldwide revolution and having the international working class run society under one Party.
The Palestinian work group plans to invite every section of the convention to submit resolutions next year to force APHA to take a position against Zionism. Years ago, the APHA leadership had lied and promised to organize a fact-finding mission to pacify these fighters. Meanwhile, Israeli forces invaded towns and hospitals killing health workers and patients, arresting and shooting kids throwing stones, and more. For a world to make public health its top priority, we must cut out the root cause: this capitalist disease responsible for state terror and racist inequality.
Rally in the Exhibit Hall
A dozen people chanted “patients, not patents” in condemnation of racist drug company practices. We protested pharmaceutical booths for their outrageous drug prices, especially for Hepatitis C treatments. Hepatitis C affects over 3 million U.S. residents and 80-160 million people worldwide and is disproportionately prevalent among the poor. Companies like Gilead are charging $80,000 for the course of treatment. This is a racist attack on our class! With the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, drug companies will be allowed to set higher prices and maintain monopoly patents for longer periods of time, further killing the working class by restraining access to drugs. While APHA security followed us and issued warnings, vendors and visitors took our literature and thanked us for providing some antiracist excitement around an important issue.
Reformism, Camara Jones Style
Incoming president, Camara Jones, instituted a campaign to make racism the major focus of APHA (about time!) APHA, like many professional organizations, tries to reform capitalism and secure a seat at the table of policy makers. We want to burn down the table and create a system based on equity where there is no profit, racism, or any other forms of oppression.
Even as the ruling class works to place liberals like Jones in charge of key mass organizations such as the APHA, her presidency is an opportunity for PLP to continue to fight for multiracial unity and militancy in the struggle for public health equity. Our aim is to do what Camara Jones never will —build a base for communist revolution among public health workers. The opening is there; as the president of the Black Caucus of Health Workers said, “we need revolution, not resolutions.” By the end of the convention, over 2,250 communist literature were distributed, including a four-page document outlining the need for communist revolution.
Join your local public health struggles and come to Denver in November 2016 for the next APHA meeting. Join the Progressive Labor Party if you see no justice under capitalism.
(Click here for leaflet on Paris Terorist Attack)
Immediately following the Paris attacks, the mass media has ramped up anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism, using them as an excuse for intensified border control and calls for war. These racist responses to a horrendous attack on the working class of Paris are exactly what the ruling class wants (whether they are French, U.S. or Saudi bosses). What we really need is working class unity against all these bosses and their warmongering.
The best way to stand in solidarity with our Parisian sisters and brothers against this most recent carnage is to stand against imperialist war on our jobs, schools and universities. These recent attacks in Paris reflect the continued chaos created by the US and French led oil war in Iraq and Syria.
Same Enemy, Same Fight!
From Paris to Damascus, Baghdad to Brooklyn the workers of the world have no good side in this dogfight for oil profits in the Middle East. Only under the international communist red flag of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) can we turn these racist wars and fascist anti-immigrant policies into a class war and fight for communism: a world without borders, wars for profit, racism or sexism.
With all their rhetoric about creating an Islamic state, ISIS (which is composed primarily of former military of the old Saddam regime and funded by both oil profits sold on the black market and small-time Saudi bosses), has actual dreams of maintaining control of key oil and gas fields in direct competition to the US and French bosses.
Since September, 2015 the French bosses have deployed their only aircraft carrier, and just this past week have expanded their bombing campaign from Iraq into Syria, carrying out over 1,300 sorties and 271 airstrikes murdering thousands of workers “without mercy.”
Workers of the World Unite!
Workers need to unite internationally against all imperialists. Communist revolution is the only solution to the problems of capitalism but we need millions of committed workers to make that happen. Communism means no bosses’ borders creating fake divisions for our class. We will share all of the world’s resources for the benefit of our whole class!
Smash Anti-Muslim racism!
Join the international Progressive Labor Party in the fight for Communism!
